Beaufort County third-grade students showed slight improvement on Read to Achieve end-of-the-year testing results for the 2014-2015 school year, as compared to the previous year.

Beaufort County Schools Superintendent Don Phipps said it is not surprising to see improvement in the second year of a program.

He said there is cause to celebrate, but he also wants to use the data to address areas that need improvement and tailor instruction to better serve the students.

“The assessment really needs to be the beginning of the cycle starting all over again,” Phipps said. “We’re hoping that we have more and more students who are proficient.”

He said addressing problems in student performance after the fact is like performing an autopsy, and the data needs to be used while the school has time to correct the problems.

According to the results released last week, 60.5 percent of third graders (310 students) scored at a proficient level on the reading assessments. Thirty-nine and a half percent (202 students) scored below a proficient level.

The Board of Education bases proficiency off of scores from the beginning-of-grade exams, the end-of-grade exams or the end-of-grade retest exams.

Sixty-six third-grade students “were exempt from mandatory retention in third grade for good cause,” according to the same document.

This is an improvement from the scores of the 2013-2014 school year, as 41.6 percent (224 students) scored below the proficiency level. However, 58.4 percent (315 students) scored at a proficient level, and only 38 students were exempt from retention in that time period.

A larger improvement was shown in the number of students who were “retained” for low proficiency, decreasing from 79 students in the 2013-2014 school year to 65 students in the 2014-2015 school year.

According to the results document, a child who is retained has three possible options for the next year: he will be retained in a third-grade accelerated class, he will be put in a transitional class or he will be put in a fourth-grade accelerated class with a label for a retained reading level.

The changes in the number of students who are exempt may be due to changing criteria for alternative assessments or related to the number of ESL (English as a Second Language) students, Phipps said.

The Read to Achieve initiative has only been implemented since the 2013-2014 school year. It is part of the North Carolina General Assembly’s Excellent Public Schools Act passed in July 2012 and aims to give more attention to third-grade readers who are at a lower level than their peers, according to the state Department of Public Instruction’s website.

“We’re proud of the accomplishments that we’ve made,” Phipps said. “We also recognize and realize that we have work to do in other areas.”