By Sara Ballenger

Egan Junior High and Almond Elementary schools will have $13,000 extra to spend this coming school year.

The schools were recipients of the Governor’s Performance Awards for meeting their 5 percent growth target on the Academic Performance Index during the 2001-02 school year. Governor Gray Davis announced the awards July 29.

The award money was scheduled to be given to schools in February but was delayed due to the state’s 2002-03 budget negotiations.

The API is part of the Public Schools Accountability Act. Passed in 1999, the law tracks and compares growth in schools’ academic performance and rewards schools that meet their performance goals, according to the state Department of Education.

A school’s API ranking is based on students’ collective scores on the Star and Stanford Achievement Test Form 9 tests, and is intended to indicate how well a school performs.

In addition to ranking schools, the API is used to determine eligibility for the monetary awards, according to the state Department of Education.

The goal of the reward system for schools is to increase test scores.

The award money earned by the schools can be used for any purpose to be decided by a group of parents, teachers, students and administrators at the school site.

To qualify for the Governor’s Performance Award, schools must meet or exceed their 5 percent growth target on the API or increase their API score by five points, whichever is greater.

All student subgroups - defined by the state as “numerically significant populations based on ethnicity and socioeconomic disadvantage” - must also meet or exceed 80 percent of the school target, or have an API score increase of four points, whichever is greater.

Increasing test scores can be more difficult than it appears.

“Only two of our schools got the money because our scores were so high two years ago we were not able to ‘improve’ enough to meet their targets, even though the schools that did not get the money were among the top 10 scoring schools in the state,” Superintendent Marge Gratiot said.

For example, Oak Avenue School ranked second from San Francisco to Salinas and third in the state. Bullis-Purissima School ranked in California’s top 10, during the 2001-02 school year.

For a complete award list, logon to www.ose.ca.gov.