By Heather Graves
Correspondent
GREEN BAY – The school district is again looking into the possibility of implementing a weighted grade point average (GPA) system.
This is a topic administration and members of the Intra-City Student Council (ICSC) said has been brought up many times over the last several years.
A weighted GPA system takes into account the difficulty of classes a student takes when calculating GPA.
At their meeting Monday, Nov. 18, board members were presented the draft-guiding change document on the possibility of a weighted system by ICSC representatives and district administration.
As the district continues to explore the possibility, a committee made up of students, parents, teachers and counselors with multiple perspectives and diverse backgrounds, as well as higher education and scholarship representatives, will meet from now until March to continue to discuss and research the possibility.
The committee will bring recommendations back to the board in April 2020, with possible action, if any, in May 2020.
“I was a bit surprised that we don’t have one (a weighted GPA system),” said Judy Wiegand, executive director of secondary education. “It will be interesting to continue to explore this and have the students bring forward recommendations.”
Text Steps update
Over the summer, thanks to a two-year grant from Ascendium Education Group, graduating students had the opportunity to participate in Text Steps.
It’s a program that supports graduating seniors by texting them during the summer to make sure they complete the necessary tasks to be able to enroll in college in the fall.
Green Bay was one of 15 districts in the state awarded the two-year grant.
Laura Siemering, East High School counselor and Text Steps coordinator, gave the school board an update on the first summer of the program and what changes are planned for the summer of 2020.
“Ascendium has done a lot of research of students who graduate from high school with college acceptance letters in hand, but then for a variety of reasons they don’t end up matriculating onto college in the fall,” Siemering said. “We all know that students communicate, they live and breath on their phones. So our work this summer involved texting with the students to help them with anything that they needed to make sure they matriculated onto college.”
Organizers saw a 49 percent participation rate for the class of 2019 in the Text Steps program.
“When I first saw that number I was a little disappointed, but when looking at the date from some of the other districts that participated in this program, we were one of the highest,” Siemering said. “The average participation rate for the districts was 20 to 35 percent.”
She said the hope is to increase the participation rate by 20 percent in 2020.
Siemering said more data about how many students who participated in the program did enroll in college this fall will be brought to the board in the next few weeks when available.
District staff transfers
Board members approved the transfer of Tyson Tatro from administrative intern at Danz Elementary School to interim elementary associate principal at Danz for a period of 11 months.
Board members also approved the transfer of Heather Zelzer from school counselor at Franklin Middle School to interim high school associate principal at Preble High School, also for a period of 11 months.