While the new report card grades for Baldwin County will not be released until December, school officials told board members they could see a decline in the system’s rankings.

Baldwin County Schools Academic Dean Joyce Woodburn said from looking at the data currently available, a decline in rankings was a possibility.

“In years past, we were ranked higher than where we are now,” Woodburn said. “We’ve taken kind of a decline over the past several years, so one of the major conversations we’ve had was the goal is to help us get back to where we deserve to be because we have an excellent system.”

BCBE Board Member David Tarwater said some of the issues associated with the potential lower rankings were directly related to economic issues the system has faced during that time.

“During those seven years, we lost hundreds of teachers because of budget cutbacks,” Tarwater said. “Things have changed dramatically for this system during that time, so it can’t surprise anyone that it affected learning. I think this system took bigger hits than some of the other state systems, so to say we dropped is a bit misleading. There are reasons we dropped and other systems stayed where they were — we had circumstances here we had to face that other systems didn’t.”

BCBE Vice President Angie Swiger agreed with Tarwater and said some new families who have moved into the area recently might not be aware of what the system had been through during that time.

“There are a lot of new people in Baldwin County who don’t know what happened in 2008 and 2009, that don’t know the cuts we had to make and the tough decisions we faced,” Swiger said. “We’ve been in such a funding crunch since that time that we’ve spent a majority of that time just trying to recover. We’ve had campaign after campaign after campaign to try to restore our funding levels just to what we had back then that, unfortunately, academics had taken a back seat to trying to find money to keep running the system.”

Woodburn told the board the system was already implementing new teaching tools to help with instruction, including the usage of pacing guides.

“Without a pacing guide, teachers are all doing their own things in terms of how they’re teaching and in what order they’re teaching lessons in,” Woodburn said. “With pacing guides, everyone is doing the same lessons across the district around the same time. It can help with collaborative learning and give our teachers the opportunity to work together to find creative instructional methods or ways to engage our students.”

Superintendent Eddie Tyler said many other school leaders around the state were somewhat skeptical of the new report card system, but he said the thought of the forthcoming grades had made an impact.

“Some of the principals said they’re now looking at the data seriously in a way they never have before,” Tyler said. “We’re going to continue to sit down with all of our administrators to try to develop ways to improve and grow what we’re doing here in Baldwin County. We have a great system here and I don’t think it will take too much to get us back into the rankings we know we deserve here.”

The board agreed with Tyler.

“I think the missing component has been ‘How do we fix this?’” Swiger said. “We have that now, and we’ll know what we need to do and how we should implement it.”