Hall County school officials said Monday night they'll have to hold off on any re-testing for students who did not perform up to standards on the recent Georgia Milestones testing.
That's because as of Friday, the state had not returned complete test results, and there's no time between now and the end of school on May 25 to prepare students to retake the tests.
School Superintendent Will Schofield said any re-testing that needs to be done will happen during summer school in June.
"Based on previous years, I'd think we'd have somewhere between 1,400 to 1,800 students in grades 3, 5 and 8 and we believe we'll capture about two-thirds of those in summer school," said Schofield. He said the other third will not be re-tested, and he doesn't believe there will be any detriment to the students who don't re-test.
Schofield said the process of re-testing can be complicated.
"First of all, you have to figure out who failed the test and needs re-testing and you like to give them some additional instruction so they have a better chance of passing it the next time around," Schofield said. "Now that it's an electronic format, we have to enter all the accommodations manually, which means hundreds of accommodations would have to be added manually at all of our elementary and middle schools, so we came to the conclusion...that this was putting way too much stress on teachers and schools...we've just ask the state to open our window [for re-testing] through June."
Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning Eloise Barron said the situation is not unique to Hall County.
"It is statewide," said Barron. "We used to have all multiple choice questions and now we have open response [questions] and with that you have to have readers."
That makes for longer testing cycles and a longer scoring process, according to Barron.
