VIDALIA — In less than a week, Concordia Parish’s students will buckle down, grab a pencil and start filling in bubbles on their high-stakes tests.

LEAP, iLEAP and GEE testing begins April 1, and schools are making their final preparations for the tests.

Mostly, though, that means staying the course.

In the years since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the state-mandated tests have taken on more and more importance, both for students and schools, so the schools have adopted policies that stress that importance to the students.

“We are just trying to get them mentally prepared and emphasize the importance of it,” Vidalia High School Principal Rick Brown said.

“We are working hard and hopefully the students will take it seriously.”

Since January, VHS has divided its teachers into four core areas, English, math, science and social studies, and the teachers coordinate their lessons to correspond with an emphasis on their core area.

Even the physical education and home economics classes are included in this program, where during the first 15 minutes of the class students work on sample test questions, Brown said.

At Vidalia Junior High, the school has been having mock tests to place students in a testing situation, VJHS Principal Whest Shirley said.

The school is continuing after-school tutoring, and teachers and administrators will have a meeting with parents at 5:30 tonight to review testing strategies and tips for home practice.

“We are going to try to utilize every moment we have until testing starts,” Shirley said. “We are going to work until 3 p.m. Tuesday.”

At Ferriday Junior High School, that means offering math tutoring during the school day and English tutoring on Saturdays, FJHS Assistant Principal Lisa Cater said.

At the elementary level, much of the focus this week is on test-taking skills and strategies students have already learned, Vidalia Upper Elementary School Principal Darla Johnston said.

Another emphasis is good pre-testing habits.

“(Parents) need to make sure (students) are attending every day,” Johnston said. “Before the tests, they need to get a good night’s sleep and eat a good meal that morning.”

Ferriday Upper Elementary School has worked all year to prepare for next week’s academic showdown, from offering after-school assistance to using a program where students can write an essay and submit it for evaluation to someone who will grade it like it would be graded for the state test.

But the school has also made it a point to get the students engaged in other things, too, FUES Principal Cindy Smith said.

“The more students are involved in other activities, the better they will do academically,” Smith said.

The school’s paraprofessionals have organized an all-LEAP pep rally for Tuesday, and have been organizing students into groups that range from cheerleaders to a stomp-group.

“That accomplishes two things,” Smith said. “It gets students involved in other things, and right before testing we typically have students who have behavior problems, but they don’t want to miss out on being in the pep rally so they behave.”

But another factor is going to be crucial to students doing well and that is parental involvement, Parish Director of Academics Paul Nelson said.

“We are lucky in Concordia Parish,” he said. We have a lot of parents who want their children to do well.”

Fourth and eighth grade students take the LEAP test, and must pass both the math and English sections of the test to advance to the next grade. High school students must pass the GEE before they will be allowed to graduate.

The iLEAP is a progress assessment test that does not carry the pass-fail weight of the LEAP test. Students in the third, fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth grades take the iLEAP.