SAD 29 school board weighs in on weighing grades

By Ben Austin
Staff Writer
    HOULTON — Weighted grades have been a highly debated issue around Houlton High School for the last two years. At Monday night’s SAD 29 school board meeting, Principal Marty Bouchard, along with guidance counselor John Turner and HHS teacher Wendy Lewis, reported to the board that the leadership team at the high school had decided that HHS would like to begin the process of weighting grades.
    “Kids are going to be rewarded for taking the more difficult classes,” explained Turner. “They have been rewarded for it in the past simply because they did more, they learned more, they were challenged more, and I think it better prepared them for college. In those terms it’s always been a benefit to take those classes, but what will happen now is that they will get rewarded by getting extra points for taking those challenging courses.”
    The board voted unanimously to approve the weighing of certain grades in the upcoming school year.
    Over the past two years numerous students and parents have had conversations with the administration at HHS to discuss the idea of weighted grades. Most parents felt that if their child was taking more challenging courses they should be graded accordingly, rather than having a lower GPA.  The school hopes that by weighting grades, more students will take advanced classes, because the students will recognize that they can maintain their GPA, and take a very challenging course at the same time.
    “I don’t understand why they wouldn’t make sense. You’re going to be gaining by taking the harder classes,” explained HHS sophomore Tanner Caron.
    At this stage, the school  is looking to only weight grades for the advanced placement classes by adding 5 percent to the averages of students in these courses. AP courses are the highest available at the school, and are meant to be equal to a freshman college course.
    “Although it was a long process in trying to involve all stake-holders, it was nice that in the end we were able to make a change that I think will help our students who are headed off to college,” said Bouchard.
    Those in opposition to weighted grades point out that students who are not in the weighted classes may develop self-esteem problems, and that by learning more the students in AP classes are already being rewarded. A study in Connecticut showed that by not weighting grades, GPA systems may play to a student’s disadvantage when applying to colleges, and that many schools in that study already had some type of weighted grades.
    Dawn Dougan, assistant superintendent, also reported during Monday night’s meeting on the results of the 2008 MEA and SAT testing. MEA is a state test, which is taken by all SAD 29 students from grades 3-8.
    “The third-to eighth-graders had excellent scores,” emphasized Dougan in an interview yesterday.
    The issue from standardized testing came about in the area of Maine High School Assessment, or MHSA,  results, where last year’s juniors slipped back 1 percent in critical reading and math compared to the results from the previous year. That one percent slip caused the juniors to miss the Adequate Yearly Progress, AYP, federal standards.
    “We always have to be going forward, but we slid back a little bit … This places us pretty much where we were before, because we have a literacy plan. We realized that we had this issue and have been working toward improving it,” said Dougan.
    There are mixed opinions within the staff of Houlton High School as to whether or not weighted grades would be able to help more students meet the AYP standards in years to come.
    During Monday night’s meeting the board accepted the transfer of three SAD 29 staff members. Michelle Sullivan will take over the secondary English position, after moving from grade 8 reading, Chelsey Pettit will fill Sullivan’s former position in the junior high after moving from the high school Learning Lab, and Daphna Harris will take over her own kindergarten class, as her former elementary special education position was terminated due to lack of need.
    The board also accepted the resignations of Lisa Sill, Tyler Putnam and Michael Kenney, who served as the vice principal at HHS for the last four years, unanimously.
    “You always hate to lose positive administrators,” explained Superintendent Steve Fitzpatrick.
    However, Kenney was unemployed for all of three minutes before being hired back on as the new secondary math teacher at HHS. Along with Kenney, the board accepted Superintendent Fitzpatrick’s recommendation to hire Rachel Upton as an elementary English teacher at the Southside School, and Craig Fournier as the Title 1 math teacher. All resignations, transfers and hires were voted on unanimously by the board. Fitzpatrick also announced that Margaret Hill would be hired at the new secretary for the Southside School.
    After nearly completing a hefty and important agenda, the board voted to go into executive session, where varsity hockey coaches Mitch Holmes and Joel Trickey joined them to discuss employment-related matters.
    The board members were in executive session for three hours before returning to the cafeteria. When the board members sat down to finish the public agenda, it was obvious to all in attendance that three voting members were missing. The three members had left either during, or directly after the executive session, due to time conflicts or prior commitments, according to Fitzpatrick. Due to the lack of members present, the board was unable to vote to come out of executive session, giving them no option but to suspend the rest of the meeting.
    “Technically we are still in executive session, although that’s not actually true. We will pick it up where we left off,” said Fitzpatrick.
    The final two votes of this month’s agenda will be taken up at the next school board meeting on Monday, September 8 at 6:30 p.m.  For information on weighted grades or MEA and SAT results call the SAD 29 central office at 532-6555.