The district parent advisory council is asking the Ministry of Education to audit math marks at New Westminster Secondary School.
The district-wide parent group sent a letter to Education Minister George Abbott on Friday calling for the province to intervene in the ongoing math saga at the high school.
"We are not sending this because we want our district to get into trouble," district parent advisory council chair Wendy Harris, who wrote the letter, told The Record. "We want to get to the bottom of this."
The math issue surfaced when NWSS parents Lisa Chao and Kal Randhawa started talking about their problems with a math teacher at the high school, whose class they believe had an unusually high failure rate. The parents felt they were being ignored by the district and eventually went to the media. Chao filed a freedom of information request to gain access to math marks at the high school, and she was alarmed by the failure rates she found.
The letter says that DPAC shares those concerns and decided an audit was necessary to rebuild "confidence" in the district.
Earlier this year, the district bumped up the grades for students in the math class in response to the Foundations of Math 11 issue, but that move didn't appease the parents. The DPAC letter says the district hasn't explained the reason for the increase, and students are unsure whether they earned the grade.
"Also, parents are cognizant of the fact that while their children's marks have been increased, this does not resolve the issue of why the district would not have taken note of significant failure rates and taken action years ago," the letter says.
The district recently reviewed data from the last eight years to assess overall student performance in math at the high school and found that the average score was 69.2 per cent.
In 1,008 math classes, there was a 91 per cent pass rate - 60 per cent received a C+ plus or higher - and just a nine per cent failure rate for the eight-year period, the district said.
"There's no question there are going to be anomalies, that is to be expected," superintendent John Woudzia said in a earlier interview about math performance in the district. "We are not here to say there are no failures. We are trying to put this in context of the courses over time."
There are outside factors that can create those anomalies, including the number of students in a class, the timing and composition of a class and whether it's the first year a course is being taught (as was the case for Chao and Randhawa's children), the district said.
Student performance is generally in line with the rest of the province, Woudzia said.
But the DPAC letter says there are "major discrepancies" that have been masked by the overall averages.
New Westminster board of education chair James Janzen didn't have much to say about DPAC's letter.
"I don't have any comment to make," he said. "I'm not going to say anything."
Janzen did say that an audit wasn't necessary.
"But it's not for us to make that decision," he said. "It's up to the ministry and ministry officials to decide what they want (to do)."
Janzen declined to comment on the district's decision to increase the grades, saying it was a "personnel" matter that he couldn't comment on for legal reasons.
"We are always concerned about every child, and we want every child to succeed," he said, adding, "and we take parents' concerns very seriously."
This isn't the first time the district parent advisory council has called for the province and others to intervene in the district.
In 2010, members of DPAC wrote to and eventually met with then education minister Margaret MacDiarmid to discuss delays in replacing the high school and to ask for the auditor general to look into the school district's finances.
For more on this story, see past coverage at www.royalcityrecord.com.
