Two local moms say the low success rate in a math class at New Westminster Secondary School should have sounded alarm bells, and they want the district to ensure that failing students aren't left floundering.
Lisa Chao and Kal Randhawa have been speaking out about what they believe to be an unusually high failure rate in classes taught by a particular teacher. They say a significant number of students in the teacher's Math classes were failing, yet they felt their concerns were stymied when they brought them forward to school district staff.
The pair came before the board of education meeting on Tuesday to tell trustees that they want the district to review and evaluate teacher performance and to track significant drops in students' grades.
"They have policy they are not following now," Chao told The Record. "They have access to data that could benefit so many kids. ... you are entering that data into the computer anyway, you are just writing a program; you can pull out the information you really need.
"It allows you to target it and have it be more effective," she added.
The parents also want the district to produce a report of the percentage of success and failures and present the data to the school planning council and the district achievement contract committee.
"It all works with policies that they have, it's just a matter of doing it," Chao said.
The women want the district to track school performance by class, including the class average, median, number of withdrawals, and a 15 per cent or higher grade change. They want classes with a low-success rate to be reviewed and interventions made to help students and staff.
Board of education vice-chair Michael Ewen said he understands the parents' frustration.
"It's the frustration everybody feels when you are dealing with the privacy act," he said. "It is really frustrating because we cannot legally report back to you. We can't say to you, 'Yes, you know we are investigating,' or 'No, we are not investigating,' or 'Yes, this has been dealt with or that hasn't been dealt with.' I get that that's an enormous frustration for people. One way to deal with that is to ask the provincial government to change the legislation. We cannot legally talk about individuals in public.
"They (parents) can't see what's happening because we can't do that in public," he said.
However, Ewen said he does support the concept of teacher evaluations.
