April 9, 2021
By: Dwayne Page
A policy for weighting TN Ready and End of Course test scores in determining final grades of DeKalb County students has been suspended this year due to the continued disruptive Covid-19 pandemic
DeKalb Board of Education Meeting Thursday Night April 8 from dwayne page on Vimeo.
The DeKalb County Board of Education made the move during its regular monthly meeting Thursday night.
Weighting is a mathematical calculation used to give more importance to certain assessments when determining an overall score.
In DeKalb County, the policy is to weight students’ TN Ready and End of Course test scores by 15% in grades 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 in calculating final grades. That portion of the testing policy is being suspended just for this year.
State lawmakers approved legislation this year designed to hold teachers, schools and districts harmless for standardized testing results from the 2020-21 school year and included a provision to allow districts to decide how much this year’s test scores should weigh in on a student’s final grade.
“Due to Covid we had discussed possibly changing the percentage of the weighted scores for TN Ready and End of Course testing. What they (Tennessee School Boards Association) recommended is if we did any changes to suspend lines 3-7 of our (Weighting policy). We did a survey among the staff in our system and the majority voted in that survey to suspend the testing value for this year for the TN Ready and End of Course,” said Director of Schools Patrick Cripps.
Meanwhile, in other business Chris Stites of the Tennessee Risk Management Trust presented a safety grant award of $5,200 to the DeKalb County School District to improve employee safety in the workplace.
“We are your workers comp and property, casualty insurance company but we are also a trust, a public entity and our board voted to include you among the 32 of our 200 public entities to receive a safety grant this year. We are awarding this grant of $5,200 to the DeKalb County School District to help reach some of your safety goals,” said Stites.
Due to DCHS Graduation on Friday, May 14, the Board of Education voted to have the next regular monthly meeting a week earlier on May 6 at 7 p.m. at the Ernest Ray Education Center instead of May 13.
At the beginning of the meeting Thursday night the Board of Education observed a moment of silence for 18 year old Cassie Maxwell, a DCHS senior who died in a car crash Monday; retired teacher Ann Puckett who passed away last week; and Freda Johnson, a school bus aide who died in March.
After the meeting Board Chairman Danny Parkerson told WJLE that one of the three Board of Education scholarships to be awarded to members of the DCHS Class of 2021 next month will be in memory of Cassie Maxwell and will go to a DCHS senior who had attended DeKalb West School.