Worthington school officials were concerned but philosophical when the district's state rating slipped from "excellent" to "continuous improvement" earlier this year.

Now those same administrators are seeing red.

And red is the lowest ranking a district can earn on the new "value-added" rating system reported by the Ohio Department of Education last week.

Worthington was the only school district in Franklin County to be slapped with a red label. It says that the students in grades four through eight are, in general, not learning at the rate expected by the state.

The new value-added system ranks districts either green, which means the district is making more than typical progress in math and reading; yellow, which means the district is making typical progress; or red, which means less-than-typical progress.

In Franklin County, only Grandview Heights school district earned a yellow ranking. The rest, except for Worthington, earned greens.

Based on achievement test scores in math and reading in grades four through eight, the district as a whole earned a green in math, but a red in reading.

The overall math score was 1.5. Grades four, six, and seven were ranked green, grades five and eight red.

The red reading score was -2.2. Grades four and five were ranked green and grades six, seven, and eight were red. The lowest grade-level score was a -11.8 on seventh-grade reading.

Worthington superintendent Melissa Conrath said officials are trying to make sense of the new system, and to understand why earlier value-added assessments done by Battelle for Kids showed the district doing well.

But she made clear that no one is making excuses for the district's poor showing on the latest state rating system.

"We're not pleased with where we are with this," she said. "We need to dig into the data to get a handle on the scores and their meaning."

Once that is better understood, the district will make changes where they are needed to improve, she said.

She and other administrators were to meet with a representative of Battelle for Kids late Tuesday afternoon. She hoped that they would help explain why the district's performance was not at the level they expected.

The Battelle group has been looking at Worthington's value-added achievement scores for about five years. In reports to administrators and to the public at school board meetings, the district seemed to be making high scores on reading, math, science, and social studies, Conrath said.

Battelle even honored two Worthington elementary schools for having some of the highest value-added scores in the state.

The value-added ratings will eventually show up on state report cards. A district will move up a spot in the rating system if it is labeled green for two consecutive years, or will move down if it earns a red label for three years in a row.

In the report cards released last August, Worthington was rated by the state as a "continuous improvement" district rather than an "excellent" district for the first time in report card history.