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The ninth grade class at Rappahannock High School, along with other high school freshmen throughout the state, will be the first Virginia students to face the new test.
What they’ll be facing is still very much up in the air.
“The initial philosophy, the initial thrust was to give students a test in th^ir senior year...so a diploma would mean something,” said Rappahannock School Superintendent Dr. William Bloomer in an interview last week.
According to Bloomer, the first idea was to allow localities to develop their own tests. This raised problems of one locality adopting an exam far more comprehensive and difficult than that adopted in another area. Instead, educators are now looking at a state-wide minimum competency test, Bloomer reported. He added that Virginia school superintendents have gone on record favoring the state-wide exam.
Bloomer attended a State Department of Education workshop on competency testing in Leesburg recently. Along with other superintendents from the region, he heard presentations on pilot programs that have been instituted in Charlottesville and Newport News and a group testing effort by six school divisions, including Campbell County, Lynchburg and Danville.
Currently, the school systems in the pilot programs and the State Department of Education are working on exactly what competencies
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