LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – The Arkansas State Department of Education has released letter grades for our schools for the first time in three years.

The letter grades take into consideration things like student success, which includes attendance, reading at grade level and A-C-T scores.

It also includes graduation rates for high schools. Sarah McKenzie from the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas said the one factor of these scores that you’ll want to pay the most attention to is growth.

“Growth takes each kid from where they were the prior year and looks to see how much they grew over the course of the year, and whether that was more or less than other kids that had similar achievement to them before,” McKenzie said.

This year, fewer schools received an ‘a’ and ‘b’ grade compared to 2019, but 60 percent of school’s scores did increase this year compared to last.