WHS needs to drop its new class-switch policy for better one

When Shirley Lundberg became the principal of Watertown High, the school started a new policy that students cannot drop classes or switch into new classes at any point throughout the year. This creates a lot of issues for students and for the school as a whole.

If a student wants to take an AP or Honors class, but feels that at some point in the year it might become too challenging or stressful for them, then the student probably won’t end up taking the class because of the inability to drop it.

This policy prevents students from taking more challenging classes, thus making the amount of students in AP or Honors classes less than they have been previous years, and, in turn, making the school look worse for not having as many students in higher-level classes.

I propose that we create a policy that is between the old one of students being allowed to drop or switch whenever they want and the new one of students never being allowed to drop or switch classes. The new policy would be that students would be allowed to drop a class in favor of a different class during a one-week period after each quarter ends.

The new policy would allow students to stop taking classes that became too difficult at some point in the year, encourage students to try new and harder classes, and allow students to switch into higher-level classes if they wanted to be challenged more.

For example, as it is now, a student struggling in Honors Chemistry with a D- has to just stick it out until the end of the year. With the new policy, this student could switch into Level 1 Chemistry during a one-week period after first, second, or third term and hopefully get a better grade. In the same way, a student getting an A+ in Level 1 English could switch into Honors English.

One of the limits of this proposed policy would be that students could switch out of an AP class but not into it. For someone to switch into an AP class, they would have to be exceptionally intelligent but it would not be fair to make exceptions based on a judgement of each individual student’s level of intelligence.

The potential issues with this proposed policy is that, 1) students might not be able to catch up with classes they had switched into; and, 2) students might abuse the allowance and switch in and out of classes excessively.

To prevent students from not being able to catch up with classes, they would be required to test into the class or make up some of the work from previous sections throughout the year, according to the teacher’s discretion.

To prevent students from abusing the allowance, they would only be allowed two switches throughout the year. If they want to switch out of electives simply because they don’t like them, that’s fine, but it would count as one of their two switches.

With this new policy, students would be able to be in classes that were better suited to them. This would make the school look better because it would have fewer students doing poorly because they were in the wrong class, and probably more students would get into good colleges that were right for them.

The new policy would, overall, be a positive change to the schedules and atmosphere at Watertown High School.

–April 12, 2014–