How can one Ky. school district drop from the top to the bottom in a year?

In 2011, the school district in Silver Grove — whose high school has the nickname the “Big Trains” — was essentially the little engine that could.

Nearly all of the high school seniors were college bound. And test scores showed the school district was performing at a high level.

Then the most recent round of scores came out. And the small district of 221 students in K-12 did not fare well. The middle school dropped to the bottom 1 percent of Kentucky schools and is now in the “focus” category in which state officials will be monitoring it closely. And the high school fell to the bottom 9 percent.

Here’s Don Weber’s follow-up report — the return to Silver Grove:

Schools across Kentucky are seeing their scores drop from the previous year’s scores because of a change in standards. But, as Don explains in this follow-up discussion from Friday’s show, that doesn’t account for how a school can drop from the top to the bottom relative to other Kentucky schools.

Here’s the report from November 2011 about the strides Silver Grove had made and how the senior class of 2011 was a model for Kentucky schools: