After a recent Colorado State Review Panel review, officials believe Adams County 14 School District still requires more time to build on improvements.

The review panel is comprised of a group of outside educators who visit low-performing schools. Their recent reports to the state noted “early indicators of progress,” but added improvements have “not yet become systematic or sustained.”

The panel also recommended the district and its high school, Adams City High School, continue working with the outside partial manager.

A statement released by Adams 14 Superintendent Karla Loría both praised and blasted the panel’s actions, saying the state had created a false narrative of a failing school leadership and called the recommendation to pull the district’s accreditation “heinous.”

“I am astounded at what a difference two years can make,” Loría said.

Loría added: “Now, two years later, the amount of work and the real progress made is finally being recognized.”

District officials had sued, arguing that state intervention had caused harm to its students — an argument the Colorado Supreme Court dismissed in October — leaving the state’s school accountability system intact.

Adams County 14 School District has struggled with low academic performance for more than a decade.

Despite these improvements, the district still holds the unenviable distinction of being in the state’s bottom 10 for academic performance, when comparing test results for the Colorado Measures of Academic Success, or CMAS — an annual measure of student success.

Each spring, the state administers the CMAS test for reading and math to third through eighth graders. And, to a lesser extent, students are also tested in science and social studies.

While the state hasn’t created a metric to rank a district or school’s academic performances, The Denver Gazette did so by calculating “a grand total” averaging math and literacy results.

Adams 14 is ranked No. 164 out of the 166 school districts with sufficient enough data to rank.

Adams County School District 14 serves more than 5,000 students in 12 schools.

The district has been shedding students with more than 400 students within the Adams 14 boundary attending Denver Public Schools last school year, according to the most recent state data.

Both the Board of Education President Renee Lovato and Classroom Teachers Association President Jason Malmberg praised the work the district has done in the face of the state accreditation threat.

“Our community has demonstrated such tremendous resilience and strength,” Board of Education President Lovato said in a statement.

“Just two years ago, the SRP (State Review Panel) recommendations resulted in a State Board of Education order that created chaos and instilled fear in our community,” Lovato said. “Adams 14 has made strong improvements and I’m confident that we’ll continue to show exceptional progress, especially now that we can focus on the work at hand and begin the healing process.”

Previously, because of long-standing issues with low academic performance, the state had sought to remove the district’s accreditation and put in place a partial manager.

The board expected to discuss panel’s recommendations when it meets at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.