MAPLEWOOD, NJ — Columbia High School has remedied the confusion that arose late last month, when automated phone calls informing several parents that their children had skipped at least one class were mistakenly made May 20 to parents of children who were actually making up PARCC testing.
CHS Principal Elizabeth Aaron told the News-Record that the affected students’ records were corrected by the attendance office after the misunderstanding was realized. Additionally, Aaron said the school sent out new phone messages and emails to parents informing them about what had happened. But if anyone still has questions, the principal said they are welcome to inquire.
“We encourage families to email or call school directly if they have concerns,” Aaron said in a May 26 email.
District spokeswoman Suzanne Turner said the attendance records have been corrected for all students who CHS knows were mistakenly marked as absent. Parents who still see a “cut” in their child’s records on PowerSchool, the online content-management system used to keep track of student data, can contact the school to alert it to the error, Turner said. Though she does not know the exact number of students affected by the glitch, the spokeswoman said it was only a “small number.”
According to Turner, the issue arose as a result of a miscommunication between the students who had to make up PARCC tests from April and their teachers. School policy dictates that teachers take attendance at the start of the school day and during every class period thereafter. The problem was that some students neglected to tell their teachers they’d be making up PARCC, she said, so many teachers assumed that they were missing class when it came time to note absences. These were then reported to parents via automated messages.
The confusion might not have been so widespread if many CHS students hadn’t missed PARCC testing due to electronic glitches that the school experienced in April. In fact, the exam was canceled April 20 and 21 after PARCC vendor Pearson Education shut down testing throughout New Jersey while it dealt with technical difficulties. Turner confirmed that a large number of the students making up the tests during the week of May 16 were doing so after missing the exams on those canceled days.
But for South Orange-Maplewood Cares About Schools co-founder Elissa Malespina, the issue at the heart of the situation is not the fact that phone calls were mistakenly made. This was not even the first time Malespina has heard of such a mistake happening within the district — it even happened to her when her son took part in a band trip. Instead, the SOMA parent and former South Orange Middle School teacher and librarian questioned why students are still taking PARCC after so much time has already been spent on it.
Districtwide, the state-mandated standardized exam was taken between April 4 and 29, with each school setting its own schedule within that time period. CHS and the middle schools scheduled testing over a four-day period for each grade level, while the elementary schools mainly set testing over a five-day period per grade level. All schools then had a week for make-up testing in May.
The problem with that, according to Malespina, is that the students are losing valuable classroom time during testing days. And she said even more time is being sacrificed for Advanced Placement exams, the New Jersey Biology Competency Test for high school students and the NJ ASK science exam for those in grades four and eight — additional standardized tests that take place around the same time as PARCC.
“How much time are we wasting?” Malespina said in a May 27 phone interview with the News-Record. “It’s a lot. It’s a huge amount. That’s more of my concern, that so much instructional time has been lost to these tests.”
The amount of time reserved for PARCC statewide has actually been reduced since 2015, the first year it was given, when the exam was given in two sections in March and in late April into May. According to a letter sent to parents from Superintendent of Schools John Ramos Sr., PARCC testing in 2016 was also shorter by 90 minutes overall — by 60 minutes for math and 30 minutes for English/language arts — and featured fewer testing sessions. The letter additionally said that juniors who took the AP English exam or the International Baccalaureate English test were exempt from taking the 11th grade ELA test for PARCC.
But that does not satisfy Malespina. If the PARCC test has to be held at all, she suggested a different schedule, such as giving more tests in a single day. That way, she said PARCC will take place in a much shorter time frame and students can spend more full days learning from their teachers. Currently they do receive classroom instruction in the afternoon after completing testing in the morning, but she pointed out that students are often mentally drained by then and therefore have no interest in studying. Many teachers even show movies during those hours, according to Malespina.
Aaron said PARCC was scheduled this year so that it would not overlap with AP testing or the district’s spring break. Whether scheduling changes occur next year remains to be seen. But if parents have any frustrations about the exam, the CHS principal said they should not be afraid to share them.
“We encouraged parents to discuss any concerns with us, their students’ teachers and, of course, with the state legislators who represent us,” Aaron said.
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