BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — New performance scores for Louisiana schools released Monday morning show an increase statewide.

Louisiana Department of Education Superintendent Cade Brumley released scores in a virtual briefing with a presentation on statewide, school system and school results.

State education officials said the school performance score now exceeds pre-pandemic levels after two years of growth, improving 1.4 points to 78.5. Brumley celebrates improvements made but recognizes that there’s still work to do.

“We think that we need to make sure that we’re being very prescriptive in understanding individual student needs, we need to make sure that we have high-quality teachers available for every classroom, we need to make sure families have choice in educational opportunities, and we need to return to the basics in literacy and the foundations of math,” said Brumley.

Brumley said the highest-scoring school systems were Zachary, West Feliciana, Ascension, DeSoto, Cameron, Lincoln, Central, Plaquemines, Vermillion and Vernon.

Most-improved school systems are East Carroll, Concordia, St. James, St. John the Baptist, Natchitoches, Evangeline, St. Martin, Acadia, Pointe Coupee and Lincoln.

Brumley believes that the work on the science of reading in schools is starting to pay off. He said the approach to work done with literacy needs to be mirrored in math teaching.

“There no doubt that in Louisiana, both the pandemic and a series of hurricanes impacted student learning,” he said. “We have worked diligently to work through those challenges. We have made up a significant amount of that learning loss, but we know we still have more work to do.”

Click here to see scores for all schools and districts.