Commissioner’s Decision
Upheld: ISD’s COVID-Prompted Revisions
In Calculating Senior Class Rankings
Ruling: A school board’s decision — approved a month before the school year was to end — to revise how its senior class rankings were to be calculated in response to the pandemic is upheld. Student v. Rocksprings ISD, No. 008-R10-10-2020. Signed March 16 by Education Commissioner Mike Morath.
Background
Shortly after the governor ordered Texas schools to close due to the pandemic, RISD’s school board changed — during an April 2020 meeting (and reaffirmed during a May 2020 meeting) — its senior class ranking policy to consider only those grades earned through the December 2019 semester instead of through the spring 2020 semester. (The board had decided that spring 2020 student grades were to be reported on a pass/fail basis.)
From “Anticipated” Valedictorian to Salutatorian
A member of the RISD 2019-20 senior class (“the student”) filed an appeal asserting that making the change so late in the school year was unfair to him and the other seniors — and caused him to drop from being the “anticipated” valedictorian to salutatorian because his grades on two dual credit courses he completed in spring 2020 were not counted for the rankings.
The student said this cost him thousands of dollars of college scholarship money reserved for Texas high school valedictorians, and that a school board member’s relative became valedictorian instead. The student also accused the school board of committing open meetings violations.
He asked the commissioner (among other things) to: 1) declare him to be valedictorian, 2) “take over” RISD and 3) order that he recover (presumably from RISD) $6,400 in college tuition and fees that he paid after graduating.
Dismissed
The commissioner concluded that the student failed to show the school board, or any school board member, had acted improperly, and that the appeal must be dismissed due to a lack of merit and for other reasons.