Some area school districts saw notable losses in math proficiency and graduation rates and two met every benchmark in a preliminary state report card released Wednesday.

The Ohio Department of Education delayed release of the official 2011-2012 local report cards pending a state auditor’s investigation of alleged irregularities in the reporting of student attendance. The preliminary report omits the performance index score, attendance rate and overall district rating because of that.

Clark-Shawnee Local Schools and Mechanicsburg Exempted Village were the only districts in Clark and Champaign counties to meet all released indicators.

Highly-rated schools are sought after by businesses considering coming to a community, said Mike McDorman, CEO of the Greater Springfield Chamber of Commerce.

“Education is the most important thing we can be working on together as a community,” he said. “Without a school district that’s seeking improvement, it’s very difficult to attract new investment and attract people to live in the area. As they improve, they’re helping us and our marketing efforts for new investments in the community.”

Springfield City School District did not meet any indicators for testing proficiency or graduation rates. The district met only the attendance indicator last year.

“The whole accountability system from my perspective at the state level is fatally flawed and needs to be updated,” Superintendent Dave Estrop said. “What we are doing in the schools has now outpaced, and frankly we’ve outgrown, the old accountability model.”

He said those models do not take into account mid-year grade promotions for talented students or other options offered to students, including online schooling, evening classes and college credit.

Estrop said that the indicator that he is most pleased with and that Springfield is most concerned with is the value-added growth score, which measures student progress over the year. Springfield has received the “Above” rating for the last 3 years.

“The children in Springfield made more progress than the state would expect to be made over the course of the last year,” Estrop said. “Even though our children have a distance to travel to catch up, they are beginning to catch up.”

The district’s graduation rate dropped from 75.9 percent to 69.7 percent, which Estrop said was partially due to a new rate calculation that compares how many students graduated with how many students enrolled as freshmen four years ago.

Graham Local schools also missed the 4-year graduation indicator for the first time in several years. The district’s 88.6 percent 4-year rate was offset by a 94.5 percent 5-year rate, which Superintendent Norm Glismann attributes to the school’s effort to encourage students to pursue a diploma over a GED.

“While we’d like everybody to get out in four years, there are some students who simply aren’t working at the rate that the other kids are,” he said. “We just want them to get through, and if it takes more than four years we’re still going to be supportive.”

Glismann said that studies show that employers value a diploma more than a GED, and that a diploma is preferred for students interested in joining the military.

Graham missed the value-added indicator this year, but the school is working on hitting that indicator through additional one-on-one intervention time for students who need extra help, Glismann said.

“Student performance is our utmost goal, so we will be working hard to improve in all areas,” Glismann said.

Northwestern Local Schools failed to meet several math indicators that the district has met previously. Proficiency grades dropped in grades 3, 4, 5 and 7.

Superintendent Tony Orr said that the drop in scores could be due to recent curriculum changes made to prepare the district for an upcoming transition from Ohio’s math and reading standards to national Common Core standards, which will start being tested in the 2014-2015 school year.

“We’re bracing ourselves for the changes that are coming,” Orr said. “The state has created a moving target that’s going to create a gap in the knowledge base for our students.”

The school’s teachers have already switched to a new math program to better reflect the new standards, Orr said.

“Until the legislators quit using education as a political football, Ohio schools are always going to be challenged with trying to meet the needs of a moving target,” Orr said. “In any other business this would be an unacceptable concept.”

Gregg Morris, superintendent of Clark-Shawnee Local, said that the district not only met all indicators for the first time this year but improved in value-added growth and adequate yearly progress, an indicator established under No Child Left Behind that measures progress by sub-groups of students that typically do not perform as well as their peers.

“One or two here or there can change that whole rating,” Morris said. “We focused on individual students and really tried to help them grow. And we would do that even without this rating.”

Morris said that although they were rated well this year, he is also worried about how upcoming changes in testing standards will reflect on local schools.

“We’re going to be better next year than we are this year, but it’s not going to show that,” he said. “It’s the reporting piece that presents a challenge.”