Lexington Trails Middle School received the 2012 Governor’s Achievement Award for the first time in the school history this year.

The award is given by the Kansas Department of Education in order to honor the top performing schools in the state. Kansas schools become recipients of the award by reaching the Standard of Excellence in the Reading and Math Assessments, meeting the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements and having a 95 percent attendance rate.

To receive the award, the governor’s award is extremely prestigious and for the year 2011, LTMS joins 43 elementary schools, 11 middle schools and 18 high schools who have also received the award.

The schools must also be in the top five percent of all schools across the state.

“Last year, we received the Standard of Excellence and made AYP, but our scores were not high enough and we didn’t qualify in that top percent,” LTMS Principal Steve Ludwig said. “This year, they [the scores] jumped quite a bit, particularly in math.”

The 7th grade state assessment proficiency scores were extremely high last year however, LTMS wanted to stay above the rising AYP. The school would have been safe already, they just wanted to see their math scores improve. LTMS accomplished just that by scoring 100 percent proficiency in reading and 99 percent were proficient in math.

“Every year we push the kids to do better,” Ludwig said. “I think the big thing that has to do with what we did and how we got there, a lot has to be said that it wasn’t just math teachers and it wasn’t just the reading teachers. Everybody came together to help out when it came to State Assessments and when kids see the number of teachers involved it… sends a message to the kids. Everybody in the building thinks it’s important. That type of message is what gets the students to give their best effort.”

The middle school hopes for the same outcome, if not better, for next year’s academic scores.