The Nye County School District recently announced that 80 percent of its 17 schools have been listed as making adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act.

This is seen as particularly good news as Amargosa Valley Elementary School and Manse Elementary School, two schools that had been designated as "needs improvement" for several years, have been placed on "hold" status. That means the two schools made adequate yearly progress last year. But they must make such progress for two consecutive years in order to be removed from the "needs improvement" category.

Each year throughout the country, schools and school districts are graded as to their performance under the No Child Left Behind Act. Schools are evaluated by tests given in third through 12th grades in mathematics, reading and writing and other factors such as attendance on test days and high school graduation rates.

Schools are graded not only on their entire student population but also by identified student groups, such as economically disadvantaged students, disabled students, those with limited English proficiency and students from five major racial and ethnic groups. If the school or any of its subgroups don't meet annual testing goals, it is identified as not having made Adequate Yearly Progress. In short, there are 37 ways to fail AYP and just one way, that of having all groups successfully pass all tests, to succeed.

Of the five Nye schools that didn't make AYP goals this year, none failed as a whole school. Rather factors such as students with disabilities not scoring as well as their regular education counterparts, and student participation on the day of testing, brought those schools into the "needs improvement" category.

Each year all schools and the district itself author school improvement plans that address areas of weakness by applying remedial efforts. In the past such efforts have included additional teacher training, the purchase of special educational materials, remedial programs for students who need help either during or after school and the assignment of specially-trained staff to certain schools.

This year the Nye County School District began two major initiatives in the area of staff development to increase active teaching and learning among the district's students and thereby increase student achievement.

A five-day Omni Conference was held for about 45 educators from throughout the county prior to the beginning of the school year. Nationally known educators and experts in the areas of active teaching and active learning were brought to Pahrump to work with staff members, giving them ideas and techniques to use in engaging students in their own learning, largely through different teaching strategies and the use of educational technology.

The second initiative, infusing educational technology into the classroom, will be carried out by the prestigious McREL (Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning) organization throughout the 2006-2007 school year. The McREL group will systematically train a group of 40 teachers from throughout the district in the uses of educational technology which can be brought into the classroom to increase student learning.

The McREL Technology Initiative is funded by a competitive grant awarded the district from the Nevada Technology Commission of the State Department of Education. The teacher participants will be given 10 days of intensive training during the school year and will be expected to produce technologically enhanced lessons designed to increase students' participation in their own learning.

Recent school gains and student progress are part of the development of a culture of excellence that the Nye County School District has sought to foster. Nye County School Superintendent Rob Roberts, one of the top 10 tech-savvy superintendents in the U.S., according to the national publication "eSchool News," quotes Aristotle, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit."