When it comes to achieving academic success in Kentucky, all groups of students are improving. The sticking point is that students of color and students in poverty are not improving as fast as others.

“We really need to see efforts to ensure that these groups of students that are behind can really catch up,” said Cory Curl, who is associate director of the Kentucky education reform organization known as the Prichard Committee.

Employees at Warren County Public Schools and other community members are working toward that by looking at how equal education is across the district’s student population. 

Skip Cleavinger, Warren County’s director of English learner programs, chairs the district’s Equity Council. It’s a group of almost 50 people ranging from central office personnel to school and community representatives. 

“When the equity council was created it was really created to examine discipline patterns in the district,” Cleavinger said of the council’s formation in 2011. 

It’s since expanded, and now examines student performance and employee diversity through its annual Equity Scorecard report. 

“It’s shown us a lot,” Cleavinger said of the report. “We had a sense that we had some real challenges, particularly with academics.” 

This year’s report lays out challenges ahead for the district. The district tracks how many students are college and career ready to gauge how successful its efforts have been. 

Overall, students were 69 percent college and career ready in the 2014-15 school year, Cleavinger said. But when it comes to English learner students, only 3 percent are college and career ready. 

“We have a lot of work to do to try to increase teacher capacity to support English learners,” Cleavinger said. 

Asian students also lag behind the state percentage for Asians in college and career readiness along with several other areas. They fall behind in 2014-15’s high school reading proficiency and distinguished state percentages, percentage of proficient and distinguished middle school math and reading, along with percentage of proficient and distinguished elementary math and reading. 

Cleavinger said that’s likely because of the high level of Burmese students, who come from southeast Asia as refugees and have faced disrupted schooling. 

When it comes to employment, about 72 percent of district students are white, while almost 95 percent of teachers are also white. Meanwhile, black students make up 8 percent of the student body, and 3.5 percent of teachers are black. 

Black students generally face disproportionate punishment compared to white students. But black students in Warren County rank at 58 violations per 1,000 compared to the statewide number of 102 for every 1,000 students for 2014-15. 

“We were pretty happy with the results overall in the discipline committee report,” Cleavinger said. 

Cleavinger described the district’s plans to open an international high school on Aug. 10 as the “biggest thing that we’ve done” in light of the reports. 

The school will welcome English learners and newcomers to America and help them learn English.  

“All the classes are basically delivered through project-based learning,” he said. 

To see improvement across the board, Curl said it will take more community involvement and schools “rethinking how they do their work.”

— Follow reporter Aaron Mudd on Twitter @aaron_muddbgdn or visit bgdailynews.com.