Bellevue East students took the ACT in April, and qualified for raffle tickets and prizes from the school based on the scores that they received.
In order to encourage students to do well on the ACT, East staff worked together to create incentives, such as a free activity card, fifty dollars, or skip a final, These prizes were won by a raffle, and the amount of tickets given to each student depended on how well they performed on the test.
“ACT results are part of the way schools in Nebraska are measured for accountability purposes,” assistant principal Susan Jensen said. “Schools are rated as either ‘Excellent’, ‘Great’, ‘Good’, or ‘Needs to Improve’.”
The ACT is a standardized test that all Nebraska high school juniors take to help rate the schools, as well as determine a student’s college readiness. Most teachers work to incorporate study materials for the test into their curriculum to help better prepare students.
“I paid attention to specific ACT study assignments given by my teachers to achieve my score,” junior Conner Findley said.
Bellevue East provides many ways for students to work towards getting their ACT scores raised. These include tools such as websites to study and outside of school classes to help students work on test taking skills and strategies.
“The school had a website called Mastery Prep that had courses for each section,” junior Chloe Loyselle said.
The raffle is another way that the school does to help students strive to do better on the exam, and is funded by various things. Some of these prizes include things such as prom tickets, fifty dollars, or skipping a final.
“Some of the prizes are of no cost,” Jensen said. “The prizes with a cost associated are paid for through a Bellevue Public Schools Foundation grant that we were awarded in the fall.”
Many students, like Findley and Loyselle, work to do well on the ACT for college purposes. Depending on scores, according to The Princeton Review, students are more likely to be offered more scholarships and more likely to be accepted into more prestigious schools.
“It was very important to offer incentives that students would be interested in earning,” Jensen said.
Currently, students are able to qualify for multiple of the incentives separate from the raffle based off of their scores. These include being able to earn off campus lunch and early out for the remainder of the school year.
“The prizes were the same for the first two years [2023-2024 and 2024-2025],” Jensen said. “We then revisited junior advisory classrooms to update and change the list based on our current students’ interests and ideas.”