WASHINGTON - Kate Salerno, the educator who runs state testing at Falls Church High School, could not sleep one recent night. She had too much to worry about. Her biggest annual event, the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) exams, was coming in May, and disaster was looming. She was going to have to tear up her lovingly conceived seating plan because technicians discovered that some testing rooms could not handle enough laptops.

By 4:15 a.m. Tuesday, she was e-mailing colleagues. “They probably thought I was nuts,” she said later.

By 6:30 a.m. she had gotten up, dressed and, passing up a bowl of Froot Loops, went to the high school. “I wasn't even hungry,” she said.

The high-energy former college basketball player, 35 and 6-foot-1, treats testing crises like big games. Her formal title is assessment coach, a new position for Fairfax County. The proliferation of testing coordinators is one of many efforts around the country to adjust to the boom in standardized testing. There's a lot riding on all the little things Salerno and her peers do to make the testing work: School reputations and professional careers can be tarnished if low scores do not improve.

Once upon a time, each teacher decided when to give a test. No one ever thought of having a full-time overseer such as Salerno. But schools are bigger, courses are more demanding and teachers are resigned to the fact that if they do not coordinate every lesson and test, students will slip through the cracks and show up on test results as bad news. This school year, Salerno is supervising more than 4,300 state tests for a school of 1,400 students. Each test is a potential headache.

Salerno walked into the high school's guidance department, unlocked a large storage closet known as “the vault” and pulled out about 100 copies of the Stanford English Language Proficiency (SELP) test she was giving that day. She handed 40 to a half-dozen special education teachers as they walked into Salerno's small office. Then she walked to the school's little theater, one of her favorite testing spots because of its spacious size and soft, noise-absorbing carpet. There, she handed out SELP tests to 53 rather resentful teen-agers.

“I hate this test,” one student said. Another said, “It's childish.”

They were children of immigrant parents and had once been labeled as having limited English proficiency, but they had worked hard on their vocabulary and grammar and thought they had shed that status. Salerno explained that federal law required her to test them two more years to follow their progress.

The SELP test was, for Salerno, a fairly easy 2 1/2 hours. She avoided the tortuous exercise in the special education room, where teachers took the essay answers that some students had typed on computers and laboriously copied them in pencil on an official answer sheet, including all errors. Those students had disabilities that entitled them to use computers. But the teachers could not paste the printed answers onto the answer sheet because the test scanner read only words written with a No. 2 pencil.

“I never said it made sense,” Salerno said, rolling her eyes.

For the second year, almost all SOL tests in the county will be done online. Salerno is thrilled to get the results back in days, not weeks. She can start preparing low-scoring students for retests even before the two-week SOL testing period is over. But the laptops must be plugged into wall sockets, and some large testing rooms, such as the little theater and the library, lack the juice and wireless capacity to serve many test-takers.

The staff members at the meeting, including Principal Janice Lloyd and others, decided to move a science SOL test to later in the week and shuffle some other exams.

Advanced Placement exams occur about the same time, but they are still done with pencil and paper and can be moved to rooms not suitable for the laptops.

For the past two years, Salerno has collaborated with 11th-grade English team leader Patrick Mohan in administering the SOL writing tests, completed earlier this year, and the upcoming reading tests. They agree on students having a 45-minute review right before every SOL test, which further complicates the test schedule.

“You might call it a cram,” she said, “but we call it a jam,” in honor of the school mascot, the jaguar. There are several jams, including a 130-minute review session for students retaking an SOL exam, listed on the two-page schedule she prints out for staffers.

Salerno managed restaurants for several years before switching to teaching because of her love of ancient history. She preferred the state tests given at her first job in Connecticut, which were essay questions rather than the multiple-choice format used in the SOL exams. But when she moved to Fairfax, she became interested in helping low-performing students conquer their troubles with the exam, using visual exercises and other methods to implant concepts in their brains.

As she coaches teachers on how to prepare students for the May tests, she endorses her school's decision to have departments give every student the same quarterly test, closely tied to the SOL exams, so that weaknesses can be spotted and everyone is on the same page.

By 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Salerno had gotten paperwork ready to pull students out of class Wednesday for makeup SELP tests. She checked her e-mail one more time, then went home and flopped on her bed.

By 5:30 p.m., she was asleep and did not wake up until the next morning.