Board hears MCAS and accountability briefing; district posts highest-ever accountability percentile and growth

Greater Lowell Regional Vocational Technical officials told the school committee that the district achieved its highest accountability rating in school history and recorded strong student growth in the 2025 MCAS cycle.

Gregory Haas, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment, presented the results, telling the committee the district’s combined "meeting and exceeding" metric put its overall accountability percentile at the 60th — the highest recorded for the school — and that the student growth percentile reached 61%, the highest level since 2019. "Our kids did so much better than we thought they would," Haas said when describing the growth metric.

Haas said the district outperformed the state in mathematics for the first time in recent years and narrowed a pre-pandemic gap in English from 28 percentage points in 2019 to about 3 points today. He highlighted subgroup performance: low-income students exceeded state averages in English (by 12%), math (by 15%) and science (by 10%); English learners and Hispanic students showed sizable gains in meeting and exceeding expectations.

Officials also reported operational metrics: an attendance rate of 95.8%, a graduation rate of 97.5% and an annual dropout rate of 0.1%. The district’s chronic absenteeism rate fell from about 21–22% in 2022 to approximately 7.5% in 2025, a change board members called "remarkable." Haas attributed improvements to targeted interventions, increased tutoring aligned to grade-level needs, Saturday boot camps for biology review and expanded lab and hands-on instruction.

Board members asked about the comparators used for subgroup analysis. One member cautioned that the district’s Asian student group differs from those in affluent districts used for comparison by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), arguing that statewide comparison standards can be misleading for local contexts.

The presentation also included comparisons to other vocational and agricultural schools, where Greater Lowell registered above-average accountability percentiles among peer institutions. Haas said the district's enrollment (about 2,314 students) and higher shares of low-income and English learner students make the gains particularly notable.

Board members and the superintendent credited teachers, administrative staff and counselors for the results, noting extensive collaboration across academic and technical programs. No policy action or new funding was approved at the meeting in direct response to the MCAS presentation; the briefing was informational and intended to inform continuing instructional strategies.

Next steps noted by presenters include continued use of benchmarking (STAR) data, targeted professional development, and refinement of tutoring and support structures to sustain and build on gains.