The Virginia Board of Education has announced its 2024-25 Exemplar School Recognition Award and seven Pittsylvania County schools and one Danville school have been recognized.

Southside Elementary, Hurt Elementary, Stony Mill Elementary, Union Hall Elementary, and Mount Airy Elementary in Pittsylvania County earned the Board of Education’s Highest Achievement Award. Galileo Magnet High School in Danville also received the Highest Achievement Award.

Schools recognized for Highest Achievement demonstrated high levels of success across all school quality indicators, including success in narrowing achievement gaps, as well as:

• Achieve Performance Level One for reading, mathematics, and science based on the student pass rate (which does not include growth measures) for the “all students” group in the school, as well as for each student group in the school.
  • In addition, schools with two student groups could have no more than a five-percentage point difference between the performance of each student group and the “all students” group; schools with three or more student groups could have no more than a ten-percentage point difference between the performance of each student group and the “all students” group.
• Achieve at Level One in the Chronic Absenteeism, Graduation and Completion Index (GCI), and Dropout Rate school quality indicators.

Chatham High School and Tunstall High School have both received the Board of Education’s Continuous Improvement Award.

Schools recognized for continuous improvement met at least one of the following criteria based on performance from school years 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024.

The school demonstrates an increase:

• in the combined rate for math, reading, and science for each of the past three years, with a total increase across the three years of ten points or more;
• in the combined rate for two or more student groups in reading and math for each of the past three years, with a total increase across the three years of ten points or more; or
• in the GCI for each of the past three years, with a total increase across the three years of four percent or more; and the school demonstrates a decrease in the dropout rate for each of the past three years with the total reduction across three years of fifteen percent or more of the first year’s dropout rate.