City of Chicopee

Dear Parents/Guardians,

Enclosed is your child’s report card.  Because these report cards are much different from traditional ones you may remember from your school days, it can sometimes be difficult to gauge your child’s progress.  It is important to remember that students are scored on a scale of 1 to 5, depending on the specific standard addressed.  Keep in mind that these scores do not correlate to letter grades that were traditionally used on report cards. 

A score of 3 means that your child is showing developmentally appropriate progress towards each standard.  His/her work shows clear understanding of topics, with some errors.  This score is about average for the beginning to the middle of the year. 

A score of 4 means that your child is consistently meeting the expectations for each standard.  His/her work shows a clear understanding of content and skills, and such content and skill is exhibited in his/her daily work with very few errors.  Scores around 4 are what we look for students to achieve by the end of the school year.

A score of 5 is rare, in that students show understanding consistently above the expectations of their grade level standards.  While it is not impossible to be above expectations in some areas, students still have much to learn about each standard, and probably will not score 5’s until the very end of the year, if at all.

A score of 2 means that in regards to a specific standard, your child may need re-teaching to grasp the concept, or he/she may struggle to meet the expectations of such standards independently.  While there is some understanding of the standard, students still require a lot of extra support from the teacher to reach complete understanding.

Students scoring a 1, lack the skills or knowledge needed to meet the standards.  They work one to one with the teacher, and make some progress, but are really struggling to develop understandings about those standards.

Some children from time to time need accommodations when an assignment needs to be completed independently after the lesson has been taught.  Teachers will sometimes mark their papers with a statement that says “With help from the Teacher”, or even adjust the assignment to meet the child’s needs.  They will reflect this help by putting an asterisk (*) next to the grade on the report card.

What to think about after seeing all those numbers: What area (or areas) is my child really excelling in?  How can we use that skill/enthusiasm to help improve the other areas that may be more difficult for him/her?  Which areas can we address at home?  As teachers, we constantly think about how to improve those areas that students are struggling in by using what they excel at.  Please know that these standards are being addressed throughout the whole year, and students are receiving the support needed to push them toward developing clear understanding.

Because the difficulty of the standards increase as the year goes on, it’s not always relevant to compare one term’s score to another term.  For instance, in grade 4 the standard “Identifies characteristics of poetry”- at the beginning of the year, students are only expected to identify the stanzas and the genre of poetry.  Later in the year, we look at more difficult components of poems- who is the speaker, are there any figurative images given through the poem, what is the mood of each poem?  You can see that the expectations for later in the year are much more difficult than the previous term, and you might notice different scores in that area.  It does not mean that if your child scored a 3 first term, and a 2 the next term, that his/her scores “went down”. It simply means that as the content became more difficult, your child needed more support.  In second grade, the standard “Writes paragraphs, stories, letters that have a beginning, middle, and end”- at the beginning of the year teachers expect 1 paragraph from children and as the year goes on they expect two paragraphs.  These are just some examples of how you may notice a decline if a child is unable to meet that expectation as it gets more difficult. 

We know this report card can seem a little overwhelming at first glance, but if you come across any questions, please don’t hesitate to call the school. 

Thank you,

Chicopee Public Schools