SOL retesting practices lead to questions from Dept. of Education

ROANOKE, Va. – School accreditation is important for every district and Standards of Learning testing determines accreditation.

The Virginia Department of Education is asking questions about testing policies across Virginia after learning about what they say is Roanoke City's unusual practice of re-testing students after the school year ends.

Six Roanoke City Schools were only partially accredited last year after not enough students passed the SOL tests. Three middle schools, Addison Aerospace Magnet, Breckinridge and Stonewall Jackson, and three elementary schools, Garden City, Hurt Park and Westside were partially accredited.

If a student fails an SOL test in third to eighth grade they may be required to get extra help including summer school.  But if enough students at the same school fail, that school isn't accredited, which is why there is incentive for schools to retest.

"You want as many schools to be accredited as possible. That's a good thing for the community. That's an economic driver," said Dr. Rita Bishop, Roanoke City Schools superintendent.

Retesting is allowed until the window closes June 23. But the Department of Education says what Roanoke City Schools does is unusual, re-testing elementary and middle school students after the school year ends.  Bishop wants the students to pass.

"We write a letter to the parents, and we ask the parents if they are interested in having their child retake the exam," said Bishop. "We have people work with the student to give them a refresher and perhaps to do some remediation and tutorial. It has been our practice to ask a child if he or she is ready to test, and then we pick a suitable testing environment, and they test."

To retest, students must have:

• Passed the course that goes with the test and failed within a small window (375-399) when passing is 400
• Failed the test for any reason and have an extenuating circumstance

Roanoke City gave 2,031 retests for elementary and middle school, and about half were at schools that aren't accredited.  While most of those tests were for failing by a just a little, 459 were for an "extenuating circumstance" ranking the excuse as the ninth highest cited in Virginia.

"I make the determination about the extenuating circumstances," said Bishop.

Bishop says Roanoke City does have not a written policy on what qualifies and that's why the Virginia Department of Education wants more information. 13,533 re-tests were given across all Virginia school districts for "extenuating circumstances" in grades 3 through 8. 

"We are looking at how many retests take place across the state, how many of those retests are due to extenuating circumstances and we're also looking at whether school divisions have divisionwide policies on extenuating circumstances or whether that issue is left to be decided at the building level," said Charles Pyle, with the Virginia Department of Education.

"There are myriads of examples dealing with legal issues, custody issues, illness issues that make up for a lot of extenuating circumstances," said Bishop.

SOL testing rules may change next year, depending on what the Department of Education finds after looking across Virginia.

Bishop points to Harrisonburg, which has a similar makeup to Roanoke schools. That school system had more than 700 elementary and middle school re-tests, and 38 percent of those students passed.

Harrisonburg has the following policy on retesting: 

"Harrisonburg will permit a student to be retested who scored below 375 if the following criteria are met:
a. The student is passing the class
b. The student’s original performance was incongruent with previous testing including SOL’s or local benchmarks. The could be caused by illness, trouble concentrating, personal issues or any other issues that kept the student from being able to perform at their best.
c. There is a strong likelihood the student will be able to pass the assessment with appropriate remediation.
If there are other requests to retest students whose initial score was below 375, they will be handled case by case."

WSLS 10 has asked for numbers on how many students retested in Roanoke passed and will update you when we get the numbers.

Click here to view the retest date from VDOE which includes 124,601 retests for scores in the 375-399 range and 13,533 retests for "extenuating circumstances".