Final decision expected at March 28 meeting
By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times
EAST MARLBOROUGH — After a four-hour, marathon work session Tuesday, the Unionville-Chadds Ford Board of Education appears to be moving toward a compromise on the issue of classifying Unionville High School Students by which tenth of the class, or decile, they fall into based on grade point average.
While the district administration had wanted to do away with the decile ranking entirely, it appears at least five board members will support a measure to substitute GPA distribution, specifying the number of students in a given year’s class that fall into GPA ranges. A final decision is expected at the March 28 formal board meeting.
The issue has become a divisive one, with passions running high on all sides. The board received petitions from students supporting the end of decile ranking, as well as a petition from students and parents asking for it to be maintained.
Although some board members said they saw it as a step forward, others argued that colleges and universities would be able to figure out which decile individual students would fall into.
“I’m betting some of our top decile students would be able to figure it out from the distribution,” board member Steven Simonson, who said he is unsure where he stands on the idea, said.
Those thoughts were echoed by other members, including Michael Rock, who suggested that if a distribution is put out instead, it is pointless to end decile ranks.
Others, including Jeff Hellrung, Carolyn Daniels and Gregg Lindner suggested they could support a compromise — with varying degrees of enthusiasm (Lindner said he’d still prefer going without distribution, but would support the change as progressing toward a better option).
Elise Anderson expressed frustration that much of the problem comes from colleges and universities that fear their rankings in the U.S. News and World Report listings of selective colleges will fall if much of their incoming classes do not come from the top 10% of a given high school class.
Much passion — and questions remain — over the proposed policy change, expressed a handful of parents in attendance at the meeting. Timotha Trigg, a former Board president, a parent of a student in the Unionville High School class of 2017, expressed concern about a process that she felt had been rushed, and argued that much of the information presented by the district has been one-sided, in favor of removing the decile ranking.
Meanwhile, Nick Caputo, a UHS 2015 graduate currently attending Carlton College, said that the decile ranking clearly hurt more students at Unionville than it helped — as Unionville produces a large number of academic achievers.
“A third decile student from Unionville could be a better student than the valedictorian at a school in the middle of no where,” Caputo said.
In other district news, the board reviewed the next phase of renovations planned for Charles F. Patton Middle School, including major work on the school’s auditorium. The board will vote later this month on whether to approve projects to rework the auditorium, replace the roof there and at Unionville Elementary School as well as various mechanical and electrical projects at Patton. The total cost is expected to about $2.9 million — in line with numbers budgeted on both the 5-year and 10-year district capital improvement plan.
As work continues, new anticipated projects in the plan will ultimately need to be funded through a bond issue, although not before 2017. Current projects are being funded through a capital reserve fund, set aside over recent years when other projects — including the high school renovation — came in under budget.
