by Cathy St. Clair
News Editor 
  The importance of one child in meeting federal No Child Left Behind Act achievement objectives was driven home in Buchanan County last week as school officials learned an appeal before the Virginia Department of Education relating to Buchanan County's Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) performance was successful.
  "One student can make a difference," Superintendent Tommy P. Justus said, adding that in Buchanan County's case, it was one student who did make a difference in the results recorded at one county school and whose test scores, when considered in the proper subgroup, resulted in the county earning AYP and its accompanying accreditation at 100 percent of its 10 schools.
  As a result,  Justus noted the Buchanan school division joined an elite group of 25 school divisions statewide which had all of their schools meet established AYP goals. There are 133 school divisions in the state.   
  Some 73 percent of the state's 1,822 schools met AYP goals.
  In Region 7, where Buchanan County is located, only two school divisions shared the distinction of having all their schools meet AYP goals. Scott County schools met the mark and Norton City schools made the grade as well.
  "To have 100 percent of our schools make AYP is just momentous itself," Justus said. "It puts us in the top 18 percent of school divisions in the Commonwealth of Virginia."
  Buchanan school officials sought an appeal of the school division's preliminary AYP findings from the DOE last month based on what it found to be the misclassification of one student at Hurley Elementary-Middle School by the DOE and the testing company compiling the scores. That error, they said, resulted in a preliminary showing that the Hurley school did not make the grade, missing the mark in science by 1.04 percent.
  A careful review of the test coding records at Hurley by local school officials, however, resulted in the error being found that a Hurley student was listed in the economically disadvantaged category sub group when in fact she should have been counted among other students not in that category. As a result, the appeal was filed by the local school division and was verified as correct by the state department of education.
  "We made it!" Testing Coordinator Linda Duty said.
  To achieve AYP, county schools had to meet or exceed 29 federal benchmarks for participation in statewide testing, achievement in reading and math and attendance or science at the elementary and middle school level, or graduation at the high school level. Not making the grade on a single benchmark can result in a school or a school division not making AYP.