Bentonville High School To Drop Exam Schedule

— Semester exams no longer will be part of Bentonville High School's schedule beginning next school year.

Chad Scott, principal, told the School Board on Monday cumulative exams may still be given, but they won't be locked into the last three days of a semester as they have been for years.

At A Glance

Lunch And Milk Prices Rising

The Bentonville School District intends to raise breakfast, lunch and milk prices beginning next school year. The School Board appears set to approve the change at its meeting April 21.

Under the plan, meal prices will increase by 10 cents across the district. Lunch at the elementary and middle school levels will increase to $2.55; lunch at the junior high and high school levels will increase to $2.75. Breakfast at all levels will increase from $1.65 to $1.75. The cost of milk at all levels will increase from 35 cents to 50 cents.

Sterling Ming, district finance director, said the change is necessary because the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires agencies participating in the federal National School Lunch Program ensure schools are providing the same level of support for lunches served to students who are not eligible for free or reduced price lunches.

The district has increased lunch prices the past two years. The milk price has not increased in 10 years. The district is losing money on milk sales, Ming said.

Source: Staff Report

"It's a change in structure. That's the key thing. It's not getting rid of anything," Scott said.

The new structure also means the high school is eliminating its exemption system, through which students may skip semester tests if their grades and attendance records are good enough.

Semester exams traditionally have been written into the schedule because administrators believed college-bound students needed the experience of taking a cumulative exam before graduating, Scott said.

"We definitely see value in that," he said. "What we continue to find is there's no question our kids are tested plenty. We are testing our students a lot."

Teachers feel like they have to give a semester exam they can grade quickly and students don't get any feedback from them, Scott said.

The semester exams also tend to punish the students who are already struggling while the best students don't even have to take those exams. Research shows more frequent assessments on less material is better practice than a cumulative assessment of much more material, Scott said.

Teachers will now be free to craft their own end-of-semester assessments that don't necessarily involve a test. For example, an English teacher might make a writing assignment that incorporates material from the semester, Scott said.

It also will allow teachers to devote more time to instruction that is typically used to review for the semester exams, Scott said.

Board members heard Scott's presentation as part of the district's larger presentation on handbooks for next school year. The board did not vote on the matter but indicated their support of the administration's plan and seem likely to vote on it at their next meeting April 21.

Wendi Cheatham, board president, said eliminating semester exams is not an effort to make classes easier for students.

"This is not lessening the load. This is just trying to do what we're doing more effectively," Cheatham said.

Exemptions, which are closely tied to attendance, create more negatives than positives for school culture, and keeping up with exemptions also consumes many hours of staff time, Scott said.

The high school will look at ways of strengthening incentives, especially for ninth-graders, to keep up their attendance rates, Scott said. That's important if the school wants to increase its graduation rate, which is about 86 percent, said Michael Poore, superintendent.

"We're losing our ninth-graders," Scott said.

The high school plans to evaluate the effectiveness of the new procedure by comparing course grades from this school year to next school year's.

NW News on 04/08/2014

Upcoming Events