Eleven public schools facing sanctions due to their performance on the latest Hawai'i State Assessment successfully petitioned to avoid penalties.

Initially, the schools' scores seemed to show that they had failed to meet some of the proficiency goals mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

However, the schools demonstrated that the state Department of Education used improper data to assess whether they achieved the required "Adequate Yearly Progress" needed to avoid sanctions.

Student proficiency in reading and math are the key components of the federal law, which imposes sanctions of increasing severity for schools not making sufficient progress toward achievement goals.

About 30 schools filed appeals, said Robert McClelland, head of the Department of Education's Systems Accountability Office.

One of those schools, Wheeler Middle, succeeded in getting all No Child sanctions lifted, said principal Brenda Vierra-Chun.

"I'm so happy for our students and teachers because they have worked so hard to achieve these gains," Vierra-Chun said, noting that the school has met its AYP goals over the past two years.

Overall, Wheeler had met its AYP goals, with 76 percent of students proficient in reading and 28 percent proficient in math. However, initial results showed that the percentage of black students proficient in math had failed to reach the federal goal.

Vierra-Chun said she appealed after finding that some of the students were not counted appropriately.

While a school may achieve its campuswide goals in math and reading, it also is required to meet proficiency goals in subcategories such as disadvantaged students, students with limited English proficiency, and various ethnic groups.

If students are not grouped accurately, the test results can get skewed and result in a school not meeting AYP. Appeals are generally based on whether students are grouped into appropriate categories, McClelland said.

That's what happened at Wheeler Middle School, Vierra-Chun said.

"When something is as high stakes as AYP, I look at everything. I make sure they copy down the scores right and what is reported to (No Child Left Behind) is what is true," Vierra-Chun said. "What alarmed me was when I saw that such a low percentage of our black students met AYP."

Vierra-Chun then began double-checking school records with student scores to make sure every student was being categorized appropriately, whether it was by ethnicity, disability or some other breakdown.

"I started to look at individual student scores and found that a lot of our African-American kids were marked as Asian/Pacific Islander," she said.

After gathering the correct data, Vierra-Chun submitted them to the DOE.

This is not the first time that Wheeler has appealed its AYP status. Last year, Vierra-Chun said, the school appealed based on the students being counted in the "disadvantaged" category.

Appeals in the No Child process are encouraged, McClelland said, since it is possible for the system to miscount or miscategorize students.

"When the results come out, schools sometimes find that the determination is based upon — for the lack of a better word — inaccurate data," he said.

There are many reasons a school may appeal, but mostly they are based on whether students are being counted in their appropriate categories, he said.

"Schools have to provide appropriate documentation to back up their appeals and in most cases they provide that," he said.

In addition to the 11 schools that are avoiding sanctions, another school whose results were previously undetermined also secured AYP status, thereby increasing the total number of Hawai'i's public schools meeting AYP goals this year to 182.

Schools were given a window of about 10 days to appeal their No Child status, announced July 19 with the release of preliminary scores of the Hawai'i State Assessment.

Last year, 100 schools met No Child goals, according to DOE data. However, that occurred under a different test, and there has been controversy about whether comparisons between scores using different tests are valid.

Reach Loren Moreno at lmoreno@honoluluadvertiser.com.