MIDLAND, Texas — Improvement is the name of the game for Midland ISD, and that's exactly what they're doing.
The district is retaining more students, meeting more academic milestones and reaching new achievements.
"We know that improvement is a continuous process and an ongoing process, but as far as celebrations, our graduation rate like I mentioned, our ACT performance, our dropout rate, we're doing really good on those," Claudia Alanis, MISD Accountability and Student Data Systems Executive Director said.
So good that they're outperforming the state in each of those areas.
Here's a look at that data:
MISD is outperforming the state with 0.4% in graduation rates.
That success is attributed to the district's dropout recovery walk program.
"Once we recover the students, it doesn't stop there. We assign a lot of interventions for these students. We make sure that we put 'em in the correct path for graduation whether it be because they didn't pass their state assessment or whether they were missing some coursework," Alanis said.
District leaders say a big factor in student performance happens outside of the classroom - it's the students' background.
"Our economically disadvantaged percentages is a big indicator that filter into our accountability and how we perform," Alanis said.
Midland's scores are compared to other districts with similar student makeup.
That number is then factored into the state average.
"In this progress, the domain is measured by how our students are performing in STAAR compared to other elementary campuses, or junior high campuses or high school campuses that are similar in STAAR scores and that are similar in economically disadvantaged percentages," Alanis said.