Students thrive on small budget

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GROVE CITY, Pa. -- This community of 16,500 people is highly educated, tightly knit and family oriented, and takes pride in local schools that do much better than the state at large -- at a significantly lower cost.

Among the largest employers here are a medical center, a General Electric diesel-engine plant and a private, liberal-arts college.

Located amid miles of dairy, corn and soybean farms in what was once the industrial Rust Belt north of Pittsburgh, the area has a Democratic tradition with many Republican and independent voters making it politically competitive.

Mercer was one of two Pennsylvania counties that supported Ronald Reagan in 1980, then switched to Democrat Walter F. Mondale in 1984, and gave the edge to Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the past three presidential contests.

However, unlike the national school unions that are backing Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, in this year's presidential contest largely because they oppose President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, school administrators and teachers here support the initiative to improve student achievement and have put their shoulders to the wheel to get it fully implemented.

"The vision is that the children will achieve at their highest level," said Robert M. Post, superintendent of the Grove City Area School District. "We look at No Child Left Behind as a marathon [that] starts in kindergarten and ends when they graduate [from high school]. So every course builds on the next course."

Mr. Post was unwilling to say explicitly that students in his schools were excelling compared with the rest of the state and particularly Pittsburgh, just to the south, and Philadelphia, where so much more is spent on public education.

But his district's student scores on state reading and math tests last year were above the state median at every grade level, except at a privately run, state-funded detention center for juvenile offenders called George Jr. Republic.

Median fifth-grade reading and math scores were 20 and 10 points, respectively, above the statewide average at Hillview Elementary School, where 123 of 179 students, or 68 percent, rated proficient or advanced. The state average was 55 percent.

Eighth-grade reading and math scores were 30 points above the state median at Grove City Area Middle School, where 149 of 240 students, or 62 percent, were proficient or advanced, compared with a statewide average of 55.2 percent.