Student Achievement

Most students face a number of stressors and challenges on any given day. Rather than ignore them (or pretend like they don’t matter), BYDS supports students in big and small ways as they navigate life’s twists and turns.

Our emphasis on student wellness stems from our belief that education should nurture and empower the whole person. With everything from educational seminars to dedicated divisional counselors to academic resource centers to serving healthy food, we make sure that all students are equipped with the coping skills and practical resources they need to thrive.

Our life skills activities include morning energizers, focused lunch, Mensch of the Month, and leadership opportunities. Our morning energizers incorporate a short and fun “brain break” to help start our day with a positive, ready-to-learn mindset. During our focused lunch, we play peaceful music in the background for the first five minutes as students quietly focus on eating and nourishing their minds. We have already seen great improvement in lunchroom behavior as well as better use of manners. Mensch of the Month will be incorporated with a new twist. Using the five life skills, one student per grade will be nominated by the grade level teachers for demonstrating the five traits throughout that month. Receiving this award is a huge honor, and these students will be recognized on Friday afternoon during Kabbalat Shabbat services.

The Comprehensive Testing Program (CTP) through the Educational Records Bureau (ERB) is a rigorous assessment for high-achieving students in areas such as reading, listening, vocabulary, writing, and mathematics. Verbal and quantitative reasoning subtests are part of the CTP beginning in Grade 3. The CTP helps compare content-specific, curriculum-based performance to the more conceptual knowledge base found in reasoning tests. It also compares student performance and growth with similar groups of achievers via national, independent, suburban public, international, association, district, class, and grade norms using scaled scores, stanines, and percentiles. Since the formation of our Student Support Team in 2015. Our students’ test scores have been on a consistent rise. Average BYDS scale scores on the 5th grade Comprehensive Testing Program (CTP) through ERB continue to surpass both suburban and independent school averages in all subcategories. Specifically, 5th-grade scores are 4.6 percent higher than independent norms in mathematics and 2.7 percent higher in reading comprehension.

We use the data received from the test to help guide students to be better prepared as writers and readers. We do this authentically so as to not constrain their learning and application to one context or situation, especially not to an assessment. Elements of the ERB and other evaluations glean light on specific growth areas and it’s our job to help mold and challenge our students thinking. Reading and writing are two of the most challenging lessons to teach – it involves processing and application – the way we have improved this is by analyzing the growth areas (i.e., what are their mistakes telling us), engaging them in the process, and creating more opportunities to apply their skills and IT WORKS!