Reynoldsburg City Schools Superintendent Steve Dackin is proud of the district’s accomplishments, but says much remains to be done.

“We have a good message, a good narrative in Reynoldsburg City Schools, and we are doing a good job, but good is not good enough,” Dackin said during his State of the Schools address to the Reynoldsburg Area Chamber of Commerce on Feb. 2.

He said education can no longer be looked at the same way that it has been in the past, referring to today’s world as a “knowledge-based” economy.

“We tend to look at things sometimes through the same lens as we’ve always looked through and I’m here to say, at least with K-12 education, we can’t do that any longer,” he said. “The rules have changed.”

Dackin said schools today can’t afford dropouts or students who don’t have the skill level and knowledge become members of a productive workforce.

“The old days of memorizing content and spitting it out on a test are now being replaced by the need to look at something for the very first time and make a critical analysis and take that information and change it and make it better,” he said.

Dackin said the school district improved from “effective” to “excellent” on the 2010-11 Ohio Department of Education report card and for the first time, met 26 of 26 state achievement indicators, receiving a 100.3 performance index score and meeting all value-added measures.

“We’ve never done that before,” he said. “We’ve done 24, or 25 of 26, but never 26 of 26.”

He said the performance index rating means the district has a higher percentage of students scoring at advanced and accelerated levels.

“We have a lot more kids advancing and learning at higher levels,” he said. “That is a first for us. We’ve never had a 100 on the performance index.”

One thing Dackin said he looks forward to is a change in the accountability system the state is planning to implement in the 2012-2013 school year.

He said it will be a ranking based on per-pupil expenditures and the percentage of expenditures related to direct classroom instruction.

Dackin said Reynoldsburg’s per-pupil expenditure is currently $9,313, which is second from the lowest in Franklin County. He said 15 school districts in the area rank higher at between $10,000 and $15,000 per pupil.

“The only school district that spends less per pupil than Reynoldsburg is Hamilton Local, which spends $9,191, and South-Western City Schools, which is just above us and spends $1,000 more than us at $10,397,” Dackin said.

Another focus for the next school year and beyond is establishing partnerships with outside entities, which will be important as the district positions itself to offer 21st-century learning opportunities, Dackin said.

He said the district has established partnerships with the BalletMet Dance Academy and Mount Carmel Health Systems, and currently is in conversations with Columbus State Community College officials about creating a regional campus hub at the Livingston Avenue high school campus.

Dackin said those partnerships are part of the district’s college career-ready agenda. He said once the Columbus State partnership is finalized, it will offer an early-college high school curriculum in the district’s Business, Education, Leadership and Law Academy.

Dackin also announced that $167 million worth of construction projects undertaken over the past eight years are near completion. He said he expects those projects to be finished by the end of the year. They will be under budget, saving the district an estimated $10-million, he said.

He said a savings of $10 million will allow the district to end a permanent improvement levy that has been in existence for the past 35 years.

“Taxpayers in Reynoldsburg are going to see a tax decrease for schools as a result of the permanent improvement levy going off the books,” Dackin said. “Our community has invested. They’ve done their fair share, and if we can do this right now, it makes sense to me and that’s why we did it.”

However, Dackin said the district is not out of the woods when it comes to operating dollars and district officials will continue to be vigilant in the future.

“Through continued vigilance on reducing our expenditures this past year, we reduced $2.5 million in anticipated expenditures and we will be reducing another $1.5 million for next school year,” he said. “I suspect as long as I’m sitting on the seat, we’ll continue to reduce anticipated expenditures because we have to.

“We have to take the 6.9-mill operating levy that was passed in 2010 and extend the life of that levy as long as we can possibly extend it and believe me, it’s a trade-off sometimes to try and balance and make sure we’re not impacting the academic programs to do that.”

Dackin said the traditional economic model that has been used in the past is no longer applicable.

“We have to change our business model,” he said. “We have to find a different way to deal with revenue, a different way to manage our expenses.”