The meeting room of the Feb. 25 Voorhees Township School District Board of Education was filled with parents, with almost all who spoke looking for answers about the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exam and chastising the board for not having answered such questions sooner.
PARCC is the new statewide standardized test being administered to all students in grades three through 11 throughout March, replacing the former standardized New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge test for lower grades and the High School Proficiency Assessment for high school students.
Based on the “common core” set of educational standards, the test is entirely computer based and has given rise to a number of controversies, the most prevalent of which at the Feb. 25 Voorhees BOE meeting being what would happen to students whose parents refused to have them take the test.
While parents have the legal right to refuse any test on behalf of their child, many districts interpret the laws concerning PARCC to mean all students must still be presented with the test.
This has lead to parents refusing the test, arguing against their child being forced to “sit and stare” at their desk for the number of hours while other children are testing.
Parent Dina Prendergast said she had refused the test three weeks ago and still had not heard back from the superintendent on what would happen to children who weren’t taking the test.
“Sit and stare is not acceptable to me,” Prendergast said. “I will not accept that. That is inhumane to my children. I think that is ostracizing a child…I want to know why I wasn’t answered with handing letters in and my emails.”
Superintendent Raymond Brosel Jr. said as of the Friday before the latest BOE meeting, representatives from the state had still failed provide information as to what can or can’t be done with students not taking the test.
However, Brosel admitted that he and the district could have done a better job keeping parents updated about PARCC.
Parent Sally Lytle, who also refused the test, said the district should have done a better job communicating to parents, even if the communication was simply that they didn’t have any answers at this time.
“This sit and stare isn’t going to cut it anymore,” Lytle said. “You’re not going to make our kids sit and stare, and we’re not going to accept sitting and stare by anybody who works for or was elected by us anymore.”
Board President Richard Nelson said he was speaking for the board when he told all parents that the children refusing the test would not be sitting and staring.
“The likelihood is they’re going to be in a separate room. Depending on how large the class is, the size of the people that are waving the test, depending on the number of students, there will be some location in the school. We don’t know what that location is right now because we don’t know what the size is,” Nelson said.
Nelson said he and the board have and never would do something wrong for the children of the district, and even if parents didn’t receive answers to their questions right away, the board would still look into the issues raised.
“If you watch our silence in some of the other meetings, yeah, sometimes we don’t know how to address it at that point and time, and to get into a debate on the floor with all these people I don’t believe is the right way to do it,” he said.
Other PARCC-related complaints raised by parents at the meeting included how a student’s refusal would be logged into the test records, how the district’s response was lacking compared to other area towns and how some parents were getting different answers from school principals versus district administrators.
