Twenty local schools have been identified as needing improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, but eight schools and districts were removed this year, the state Education Department announced today.

Local schools new to the list were Park Avenue School in Port Chester and Museum School in Yonkers.

Click here for a searchable database of each school or district’s academic standing.

Schools and districts are categorized as needing improvement if they don’t make sufficient improvement for two consecutive years in areas they were sanctioned for, including student participation and performance on state exams.

Statewide, a total of 35 districts and 499 elementary, middle and high schools were on the list, which is part of the state’s accountability system. Of these, 49 schools and three districts were newly identified this year.

That number is down from 61 districts and 665 schools last year.

New York has nearly 700 school districts and some 4,750 schools, so about 5 percent of all districts and 10.5 percent of all schools are under-performing.

In Westchester County, the list includes: Greenburgh — Woodlands Sr. High; Mount Vernon — Columbus School, Mount Vernon High School, Nelson Mandela; Ossining — Ossining High School; Peekskill — Peekskill High School; Port Chester — Park Avenue School; White Plains — Post Road, White Plains High School; Yonkers — Robert C. Dodson, School 13, Museum, Emerson Middle School, Gorton High School, Roosevelt High School, Martin Luther King, Riverside High School. Rye Middle School is also on the list, but it is due to a reporting error that has been corrected with the state, according to the Rye superintendent.

In Rockland, the list includes: North Rockland — Fieldstone Secondary, Haverstraw Middle School.

No schools in Putnam County were on the list.

Removed from the list this year were the East Ramapo district; the Mount Vernon district; the Port Chester district; the Yonkers district; Davis Middle School in Mount Vernon; Yonkers Middle School and Mark Twain Middle School and Cedar Place Elementary School in Yonkers.

The list also includes “special act” districts serving some of the neediest students, mostly from New York City. These districts include Abbott in Irvington; Greenburgh 11 in Dobbs Ferry; Greenburgh-Graham in Hastings-on-Hudson; Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls in Hawthorne; Mount Pleasant-Blythedale in Valhalla; and Mount Pleasant-Cottage in Pleasantville.

Also today, the Education Department released its new list of persistently violent schools, another accountability measure states are required to report under the No Child Left Behind Act. Schools are labeled as persistently dangerous if they have two successive years of serious incidents as defined by the state, such as robbery, sexual offenses, assault, arson and use of a weapon.

No schools in the Lower Hudson Valley made the list of persistently violent schools.

UPDATE (8/28): Read today’s story here.