Ellsworth Superintendent Frank Hackett knows that the list on which his school system recently found itself doesn’t look good, but he can explain.

First, he said, consider the math portion of the 2005 Maine Education Assessment test, where his eighth-grade pupils were dead-even with their peers across the state.

Then look at the reading side, he said, where Ellsworth middle schoolers actually outperformed the state average by 6 percent.

Even more encouraging, Hackett said, is the across-the-board improvements he has seen in his pupils that can’t be measured by numbers.

Still, despite the perceived progress, Ellsworth’s eighth-grade class for 2005 was among 25 classes across the state that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” under federal No Child Left Behind guidelines.

“It’s frustrating because we really couldn’t be more excited about the progress we’ve made,” Hackett said this week from his office. “If you look at straight performance, we’re in great shape.”

Results released last week by the Maine Department of Education revealed that 92 percent of schools in the state successfully made progress under No Child Left Behind, which puts emphasis on two subjects: math and reading.

In Maine, that progress is based on annual MEA results.

“It’s hard to compare numbers year to year because the criteria changes,” said George Tucker at the Maine Department of Education. “But we’re very encouraged by the numbers, especially when you start comparing Maine to other states.”

New Hampshire, for example, saw 40 percent of its schools fail under NCLB in 2005.

But even while the Maine ratio is strong, 25 schools, such as Ellsworth, fell short for at least the second consecutive year and now are listed as “priority” schools.

Another 30 schools were given “monitor status,” meaning they didn’t make progress for 2005-06 alone.

Hackett admitted that while the “priority” status concerns him, it’s not as simple as it seems.

“NCLB is good in the sense that it offers unprecedented accountability, but the law doesn’t always apply well, especially in rural areas, which Maine has a lot of,” Hackett said.

For instance, he said, the adequate yearly progress guidelines under NCLB are broken down into several subgroups, such as low-income students, minority students and students with special needs.

“In general, the most difficult group to make adequate yearly progress were the developmentally challenged or special education students,” Tucker admitted.

Ellsworth, where 16 percent of the student body qualifies as needing special education, is no exception.

The school system has 1,305 children from kindergarten through high school, which means about 100 pupils are in eighth grade each year.

It also means that the number of special education students in eighth grade is not a high number. So when that subgroup failed to make adequate yearly progress, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint the difference.

“It almost always is just one student that keeps a school from making the grade,” Tucker said. “It’s all based on percentages, so smaller schools are more likely to see one student bring that percentage down considerably.”

Katrina Kane, Ellsworth’s director of curriculum, said that in light of the NCLB results she has to work hard to convince her teachers that they’re not necessarily doing anything wrong.

“NCLB sends the message that reading and math are the goals, and we certainly do focus on that, but we want to make sure others things aren’t being missed,” she said. “Also, we want to stay focused on the big picture and not just on a subgroup.”

Confounding the problem for school systems like Ellsworth that have too few low-income students to be classified as Title I schools, no additional federal funds are made available when the NCLB numbers are lagging.

Under NCLB, schools with a high enough percentage of low-income students to be classified Title I receive funding to help bring their results up.

Of the 25 priority schools in Maine, only six are classified as Title I.

“That funding is able to provide services in a shorter amount of time, and that can make a bigger difference in a shorter time,” Tucker said. “The non-Title I schools, they don’t have the same options or resources to devote, so they’re going to have a harder time producing the results.”

Searsport District Middle School is a Title I school that has failed to make adequate yearly progress in math in four of the last five years.

Like Ellsworth, it was Searsport’s special education subgroup that put the school back on the priority list most recently.

But because it received Title I funding, Searsport was able to install a new math curriculum, offer additional after-school tutoring, and send teachers to professional development workshops and seminars. Those changes lifted the scores of the entire student body, lifting the school as a whole off the priority list last year.

Hackett, however, said he doesn’t have the luxury of the Title I resources, and that puts even more strain on his educators.

“Without funds, we’re seeing fewer support services in the classroom, but we’ll try to identify the individual students that need additional help on a situational basis,” he said. “We don’t think it’s a programmatic issue,” he said and was quick to provide numbers to back that up.

Tucker agreed that NCLB has its drawbacks and is not always indicative of progress.

“I think the progress that is seen on the whole school level, it takes a little longer to work down to those challenging subgroups,” he said. “Individual kids may make huge progress. That doesn’t show in this calculation.”

Schools like Ellsworth have until March 2007, when the next round of MEA results will be released, to improve their status. Hackett and Kane both said that shouldn’t be a problem.

“The good thing is that it’s such a small subgroup,” Hackett said. “We can monitor those students closely and more easily track their progress.”