SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, or DESE, released its 2022 annual performance report for schools in Missouri.

APRs demonstrate the progress local education agencies, or LEAs, and their individual buildings are making toward meeting the standards and Indicators in the sixth version of the Missouri School Improvement Program, or MSIP 6.

The program is the state’s system for reviewing and accrediting and classifying LEAs. Because MSIP 6 is a new system with different scoring, it is inaccurate to compare an LEA’s 2022 APR score to previous years.

Here are some of the local school districts in our area and what their APR report scores were:

Nixa received the highest score out of schools here in the Ozarks with a score of 93.9%.

Republic was scored at 88.8%

Ozark is not too far behind at 87.3%.

Ash Grove and Bolivar followed closely with their scores being 85.7% and 84.3% respectively.

Branson and Willard are nearly identical with their scores at 79.7% and 79.6%.

Springfield, the state’s largest district in the state of Missouri, received a score of 73.7%.

The Commissioner of Education Margie Vandeven, said in a press release that due to the scoring system’s newness that “we encourage stakeholders, including community partners and families, to focus less on the APR score and more on the underlying data to learn how they may better support student learning.”

Superintendent Grenita Lathan said in a press release that she is proud of the progress that SPS is making to provide students with great opportunities.

“Our APR results prove that Team SPS is focused on continuous improvement, where we earned 92.3% of the points possible,” Lathan said. “I am especially proud that our district received full credit in recognition of our four-year graduation rate.”