Colorado schools graded on a curve, local results mixed

All of Colorado’s public schools have been graded and ranked by Colorado School Grades, a coalition that translates state rankings of public schools into simple letter grades.

Now report cards have been released and the results in the Grand Valley are mixed.

"We purposely picked out a home in the district that we knew we wanted our kids to go too based on the rankings," Stacey Hale, a mother of two Pomona Elementary students, said.

When Hale was moving her family from Carbondale she wanted to make sure her kids went to a good school.

"It was a big deal for us to move out to Grand Junction,” she said.  “I got on coloradoschoolgrades.com and researched schools.”

By assigning a letter grade based on school performance, it’s providing an alternative to the Colorado Department of Education's ranking, the ranking used by School District 51.

"When you look at our schools performance and try to compare it to a letter grade and how they all compare to each other, its not quite lining up in our heads,” Christ McGee, with School District 51, said. “I would just caution people that that might not be the ultimate source to evaluate when you’re looking at school performance."

In Grand Junction, Colorado School Grades gave Redlands Middle School an A, but on the other hand, Central High School only earned a C-.

Under the coalitions grading system, all the schools are graded on a curve. That means most are given a C for average and just the top ten percent of schools get an A.

Despite objections from District 51, Hale says she encourages other parents to use the Colorado School Grades website.

School District 51 feeds all of its information and statistics to the Colorado Department of Education.

It suggests if you’re looking into different schools to check out schoolview.org.