More than 200 city eighth-graders who thought they would be required to repeat the grade received good news this week.
Although the pupils did not meet the standards of the system's strict promotion policy, school officials decided to move them along. They will be placed in the ninth grade or in a transitional program called 9T, which provides remedial help.
The move appears to further loosen what was intended to be a tough promotion policy, which declared three years ago that students would meet performance standards in each grade or be held back, without exception.
This year, more than 2,700 failing students in the city were promoted, more than half of them because they had been retained at least one time before.
Yesterday, the last of about 235 eighth-graders who failed summer school and should have been held back were moved along, officials said.
"The majority of the students moved to 9T, and a smaller number moved to ninth grade," said Chief Academic Officer Cassandra W. Jones.
Concluding that eighth-graders were being held to more promotion standards than other students, the city school board agreed last month to review the records of eighth-graders who had failed.
The promotion policy requires that students pass their core courses - English, math, science and social studies - and reach the 23rd percentile on the CTB/Terra Nova, a standardized test.
But eighth-graders also must pass four other exams, the Maryland Functional Tests, to move on to ninth grade. As a result, eighth-graders must meet nine standards for promotion while students in other grades must meet five.
"The idea of hitting nine hurdles, each one exactly," said board Vice Chairman Sam Stringfield, "I think that might have been a little unreasonable."
School officials also worried that some frustrated eighth-graders who had been retained would drop out of school.
"Some of these students had not actually come to school [this year]," Jones said.
Many of the recently promoted eighth-graders had extenuating circumstances, Jones said, such as the death of both parents in an extreme case. Others had been retained more than once.
"We had to go back and look at these case by case," she said.
Stringfield said such an individualized review of eighth-graders was appropriate because the promotion policy was never intended to be one size fits all.
