It was less than three weeks ago that Oregon received a waiver from many of the No Child Left Behind mandates, but already the state is moving on a new accountability system.

The Oregon Department of Education has identified 95 public schools around the state that will receive special support and intervention designed to close achievement gaps among impoverished students. Of those 95 schools, nine Central Oregon schools are on the list.

The new accountability system, which will essentially replace the Adequate Yearly Progress system that Oregon issued each year in accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind law, provides a variety of measures to determine how schools are doing. At the high school level these measures include overall graduation rates and graduation rates among subgroups. All schools also will be rated based on their academic achievement, growth and subgroups’ growth.

From those measures, schools will receive a rating and a designation. Those designations will be model, strong, satisfactory, focus and priority.

As a first step, this week the state announced high-poverty schools that will receive support from the state to try to turn around their underachieving students.

The state picked 18 schools — all high-poverty and among the bottom 5 percent of the state’s low-performing schools — as priority schools. It also selected 17 schools currently receiving federal school improvement grants to participate as priority schools.

Locally, Bend-La Pine Schools’ Marshall High School was selected as a priority school, as were Jefferson County Middle School, Madras High School and Warm Springs Elementary School.

Lora Nordquist, Bend-La Pine Schools’ assistant superintendent for elementary education, said Marshall High is on the list because it received one of the federal grants. But she said the district has long been concerned about the school’s performance.

“We are concerned when we have schools that are considered among the lowest-performing schools in the state,” she said. “We take that really seriously, and we want to do what we can as a district, and the schools themselves want to do what they can, to address the issues.”

The state also named 60 focus schools, all within the bottom 15 percent of high-poverty, low-performing schools statewide. Locally, Buff Intermediate School in Jefferson County and La Pine and Rosland elementaries in Deschutes County were named focus schools.

Both priority and focus schools will conduct reviews to determine why they’re struggling. Then the district must create a comprehensive achievement plan that addresses how the school and district will fix the problems and create specific goals. The schools will receive support from the state.

Oregon Department of Education spokeswoman Crystal Greene said that support will include funding, training, staff resources and the sharing of best practices. “It’s going to be actively working each school to see what are the barriers that school has, what needs to happen to help them move in the direction they need to be going in.”

Finally, the state selected 27 model schools, which are schools with high poverty that have been successful in student achievement. Both Westside Village Magnet School in Bend and Sisters Elementary School were named model schools and will serve as mentors to other schools, sharing how they achieved the distinction with schools that have traditionally struggled.

Nordquist said she believes the new accountability system has some improvements over the No Child Left Behind model, which was called Adequate Yearly Progress.

“One thing I think is a step in the right direction is the focus on student growth, and the idea that that’s a big part of how schools are rated,” she said. “In the end we know that we have to get students to high levels of achievement, but giving some attention to growth really helps you have small victories of knowing that the hard work you’re doing is paying off.”

Nordquist said the growth measurement will be based in the state reading and mathematics tests. For example, the state will look at a student who has just finished fourth grade, examine how she did on the third-grade math test, then compare that student to other students who had the same score in third grade to see how the student’s knowledge grew and how her growth compared with that of other students.

Nordquist likes that the new state accountability system will not be punitive. Under AYP, some schools that continually failed to demonstrate student achievement were punished. Students could choose to transfer out of those schools, or the federal government could require the schools to offer tutoring or other services without additional funding.

“The information that we have heard is that there’s no intention for this to be punitive; the focus will be on support,” Nordquist said. “What that will look like, I don’t know yet.”

Jefferson County School District Superintendent Rick Molitor said the district’s high school and middle school both have school improvement grants they’re using to push student achievement.

He is cautiously optimistic about the new accountability system.

“I think it’s a step in the right direction, but what we’re all looking at is how the theory turns into reality,” Molitor said. “The state basically made the comment saying that they want to create a system that focuses on school improvement and support. … We are doing some amazing things in this district and we’re seeing some very positive results. We’d like assistance in those areas we’d like to continue growing on, and I think it’s the responsibility of the state to come to our district and realize and see what are the support elements that are needed.”

Molitor does have a concern. Mostly, he worries that the lowest-performing schools will receive funding, then will be cut off when they show improvement, creating what he called a yo-yo effect.

“That’s what is a little bit unknown and a little scary,” he said.

In the past, Oregon issued reports detailing how schools and districts shaped up with the federal No Child Left Behind requirements, as well as Oregon report cards, which used a wider array of measurements.

Greene said this will be a transition year, and that for now annual Oregon report cards will look very similar to past years. But as the state moves forward with this new accountability system, its report card will shift to be based on the new system.

“Some of this is still to be developed,” she said.

While this week’s announcement focuses only on Title I, or high-poverty schools, Greene said the system will eventually apply to all schools. Statewide, all schools have already been ranked with a number, the lowest possible score 1, the highest 5. But for now the state is only focused on schools that receive Title I funds.