An analysis of Surry County Public Schools’ performance on Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests over the past five years shows the school system has returned to its divisionwide pre-pandemic pass rates in reading but is still behind in all other subjects.

The Virginia Department of Education recently released test scores for the 2023-24 school year, which show Surry at a divisionwide 78% reading pass rate, up from 76% the prior two years. The last time Surry saw a 78% divisionwide reading pass rate was in 2018-19, one year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the past two school years, the division has seen a 70% writing pass rate, which is below the 76% pass rate for 2018-19. The writing test is given only to students in grades 8-12.

The division saw a 75% math pass rate, up from 70% the prior year and 65% the year before. Though the rate is still below the 81% who passed in 2018-19.

The reading and math tests are given to all students in grades 3-12.

On the history SOL, which is only given to students in grades 5 and 8-12, the division’s results show a 72% pass rate, up from 67% the prior year and 58% the year before that. The 2023-24 rate exceeds the 65% statewide pass rate but remains below the 78% pass rate the division saw in 2018-19.

Results from the science SOL, which is also given only to students in grades 5 and 8-12, showed a 67% divisionwide pass rate, down from 69% the prior year but up from 66% the year before that. The 2023-24 rate is one point below the statewide 68% pass rate and has yet to return to the 82% pass rate the division saw in 2018-19.

Luther Porter Jackson Middle School, which saw a 70% math SOL pass rate, remains below the 86% rate from 2018-19. The grades 5-8 middle school saw a 77% pass rate in reading, which is up one point from the prior year, down from 78% the year before that, and still below the 80% who passed in 2018-19.

Luther Porter Jackson’s reading pass rate from 2023-24 surpasses the statewide 73% rate. The school’s math pass rate, however, is below the 71% statewide pass rate.

Luther Porter Jackson saw a 66% pass rate in history, down one point from the prior year, and still well below the 83% pass rate seen in 2018-19. The school’s 73% pass rate on the science SOL reflects a drop from the 86% who passed the prior year. The prior year’s score exceeded the 81% science pass rate seen in 2018-19.

Surry County High School has exceeded its 73% pre-pandemic pass rate in math every school year since 2020-21. The 93% who passed the math test in 2023-24 reflect the highest rate in five years.

Surry County High’s reading pass rate, at 83%, is a four-point drop from the 87% who passed the prior year, and below the 89% who passed in 2018-19.

The divisionwide data shows a widening racial performance gap over the past seven years.

During the 2016-17 and 2027-18 school years, when the state used different content on its SOLs than the curriculum in use by 2018-19, reading SOL pass rates among Black and white students were within one percentage point of each other. The math SOL pass rate among Black students, over those same two years, surpassed the pass rate among white students by three to eight percentage points. By 2018-19, the math and reading pass rates among white students, which that school year accounted for 36% of the division’s enrollment, had grown higher than the pass rate among Black students, by 11 points and seven points, respectively.

Those disparities have persisted since the start of the pandemic, in part due to a demographic shift. In 2023-24, white students accounted for 43.4% the division’s enrollment – the same percentage as its Black population – but passed the reading and math SOLs at rates 18 points and 29 points higher than their Black peers, respectively.

Meanwhile, the disparity in scores between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers has is now at or below pre-pandemic levels. In 2023-24, 53% of students with disabilities passed the reading SOL, the division’s highest percentage in seven years. Fifty-five percent passed the math SOL, reflecting the highest pass rate among students with disabilities since 2018-19.