FERRIDAY — Ferriday Junior High School is taking steps to improve its school rating — through data.

A new initiative called the data teams cycle begins Wednesday, and is part of new Principal Toyua Watson’s efforts to use data to drive instruction.

The goal of the program is to ultimately bring up the school’s F rating, Watson said.

“We don’t go from F to A overnight,” Watson said.

Watson said FJHS is four points away from being a D school.

“We’re going to work hard to get those four points,” Watson said.

Watson said the program gives students short pretests on standardized test standards at the beginning of a learning cycle. Student then learn more about the skills over time.

Afterward, students take a posttest to see how much they have learned.

“It helps us to be more familiarized with the standards,” Watson said.

During the end of August and beginning of September, Watson said teachers started a 10-day challenge, a smaller version of the program

“This one is different because it’s just for them (teachers) to learn the process,” Watson said.

Unlike the full program, which will involve all classes, Watson said teachers only had to involve one of their classes and the cycle lasted approximately 10 school days.

On the first day, Watson said teachers met and chose a skill. After picking a skill on which to focus, Watson said teachers gave students a short test of three to four questions.

Watson said the questions are based on English, social studies, math and science standardized test questions.

Eighth-grade English teacher Christopher Schilling tested his students on citing evidence.

“It’s the one (skill) that we’re going to use most in our class,” Schilling said, referring to the standard.

Then, teachers recorded the data and had short focus lessons to help students. During the lessons, Schilling said he saw some of his students improve.

Tierra Spurs, 13, said when she first looked at the math questions, they were unfamiliar. But Spurs said she learned more about them from reading the questions and later lessons.

“It makes my brain think more than it normally does,” Spurs said.

Something similar happened when Spurs took the pretests for reading and social studies, she said.

“(The history test) made me understand more about the history of Louisiana,” Spurs said.

On the final day, students were tested again to see if their test scores improved.

“I’m expecting some large improvement,” Schilling said.

Today, teachers will examine and discuss the results. Then, tomorrow, the full program begins.