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Although Opp High School’s state report card score fell by one point, principal Aaron Hightower said they are working hard to improve.

On the 2017-2018 report card, OHS scored an 80. On the 2018-2019 report card they scored a 79.

“Any time you run any organization, you want production to go up,” Hightower said. “It was a little disappointing even though we went down by only one point. I think what made it a little more disappointing is that we went down from a ‘B’ to a ‘C.’ I know that our people are working hard and I know that we have several processes in place and I’m sure we will show some increase soon.”

The two areas of concern for Hightower are academic achievement and graduation rate.

“We definitely want academic achievement to go up,” Hightower said. “We do have things in place for that to get better. We have so many things through ACT and there is no substitute for high quality instruction. With graduation rate, there are several people that think that when it comes to that it is only based on kids that drop out and that is the reason that it goes down. There are so many other facets of that. You can have a kid that completes a program, but doesn’t fall under certain criteria and you don’t get credit for them on your graduation rate. We are trying to look at those things and go to different meetings to get training. We are also looking at different avenues to make sure our graduation rate continues to climb. We already feel like we are going to be better on our next report card in regards to graduation.”

Despite the score, Hightower said they will continue to work.

“The biggest challenge is that every single academic class you get, their abilities are going to be different,” Hightower said. “So, as a school, we have to have processes in place where regardless of the ability, we have something in place that will be exactly to their needs. We think we have one in place now, we just have to continue to work on it and tweak it.”