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School and school district scores from Utah's new computer-adaptive test were released in October, but many parents have yet to see how their own children performed.
After more than a month of preparation, the first student testing report cards have been mailed, and school administrators say they're working to get the rest of the information out.
Scores for many grade-schoolers were sent home with end-of-quarter report cards. And at the middle and high school levels, where classes typically are scheduled in semesters rather than quarters, school managers were in the final stages of preparing reports when classes ended for the Thanksgiving holiday.
"We expect to have all the reports issued in the first part of December," Canyons School District spokeswoman Jennifer Toomer-Cook said.
The Utah Office of Education spent months preparing the SAGE test results for release in October. At the time, officials warned that individual districts and schools would need time to prepare students and parents for what could look like a major shift in a child's testing performance. Each district's leaders decided how to explain and pass out individual students' reports.
West High Principal Parley Jacobs said there were a number of logistical challenges in preparing the assessments, which measure how students performed last spring on the state's new SAGE test.
Schools had to wait for test data to be released by the state office, and each child in grades three through 11 will receive three separate reports for the math, science and English SAGE tests.
The Salt Lake City School District did not create a uniform policy for distributing the reports, but instead allowed each school to determine the best way to get information to parents, district spokesman Jason Olsen said.
At West High, Jacobs said the multiple-page reports and accompanying materials translated to roughly 18,000 sheets of paper that had to be organized by student and subject matter.
"As soon as we get those collated, we'll be getting them into the teachers' classrooms and then we'll send a note home to parents," Jacobs said. "We're just about ready to send them home."
But for some parents, eager to see how their children performed, it has been frustrating waiting roughly six months to see scores.
"I thought it took too long," said Sheri Mattle, a member of the Bingham High School Community Council.
Mattle called her school when she noticed other parents had started receiving their SAGE reports. The reports arrived before she heard back.
Next time, "if they had it available within a couple weeks or even by the time school started, that would be nice," she said.
Joe Stetich also got a report for his daughter, a fifth-grader at Salt Lake City's Emerson Elementary.
"It's the first one and I'm sorry that we didn't get the grade back faster," Joe Stetich said. "As a parent, and in modern society, you just want it on demand."
He said the report is initially difficult to read, with a number of different metrics and numbers indicating a student's performance. The assessments also make it difficult to determine how an individual child compares to their peers, Stetich said.
Students earn an overall score on each SAGE test, which places them in one of four proficiency levels. The reports allow for some comparison by including the average score on that test for the state, school district and school.
But Stetich said he's used to seeing a percentile rating that indicates where his daughter falls relative to other children who took the test.
"It's very different from what we're used to," he said.
In Granite School District, parents will be able to look at their children's reports by Dec. 1 through the district's online student system, spokesman Ben Horsley said.
And in Jordan School District, spokeswoman Sandra Riesgraf said, each school is following its own procedure for distributing reports. Most of the district's elementary student reports had already been sent to parents.
"It was a site-based decision," Riesgraf said, "but all of them should be out and in parents' hands by next week."