Coosa High School has once again earned recognition from The Governor's Cup Challenge for SAT success.  Coosa High School has won the 7-AA Region title in the academic competition.  Coosa High finished fourth in the state championship for the 2007 AA Governor’s Cup but was the only AA classification school region winner to have an SAT average higher than the national average.  Coosa High’s scores have been above the national average for the last two years.  Coosa High was one of the first schools to receive a Governor’s Cup when the SAT Challenge was instituted in 2004. 

The Governor's Cup Challenge calculates average three-year gains made by schools on their most recent SAT in both the critical reading and math sections. Three years worth of scores are used to promote on-going improvement in student performance on the SAT.   It is significant that Coosa High was the only school of the AA region winners to be above the national average in SAT scores because statistics show that it is much more difficult to significantly raise test scores when your scores are already at a high level. 

Coosa High School will receive a $1,000 grant check from Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS) and a trophy.  The $1,000 is to be used to continue SAT improvement efforts at Coosa High.  Sam Sprewell, principal at Coosa High, said, “This is a tremendous recognition of the efforts of our school and our students.”  The faculty of Coosa has not decided on how they will use the check but Sprewell is confident that the trend of improvement will continue.  He said, “We have a tremendous partnership with our central administration, Cambridge Educational Services, and our faculty and staff.  I am sure that we will be able to put this award to good use to improve resources for our students.” 

The Governor’s Cup Challenge is organized by Georgia High school Association (GHSA) class and region assignments to allow schools to be compared against similarly sized schools within the same region of the state. The GHSA divides schools into five classes (i.e. A, AA, AAA, AAAA, and AAAAA) with each class having eight regions.

Within each GHSA region of each class, the school that has the greatest average gain in the most recent total SAT score for critical reading plus math over the previous three years will be selected as a regional winner. This qualifies 40 schools (5 classes x 8 regions) as regional winners.

Regional winners of each class are then compared against one another by their average SAT gains to determine five class winners.

For the past four years, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS) has sponsored the Governor's Cup competition. TBS has made awards to both region and class winners, and most recently, to top scorers within each GHSA class.

All region winners and their scores can be seen on the web site SATRocks.com,  the official website of Governor Sonny Perdue's Governor's Cup Challenge to Georgia high schools to improve SAT* scores.