SNOHOMISH – Ryland Penta and Jennifer Foster are good students. The ninth-graders have grade-point averages just below 3.0 at the Snohomish Freshman Campus.
Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald
Ryland, 14, plays basketball and is on the newspaper staff and the Associated Student Body. Jennifer, 15, plays soccer and referees games, is on the newspaper staff and helps out at her father’s print shop.
Both failed portions of their last WASL test.
As part of the first graduating class to have to pass the Washington Assessment of Student Learning in order to graduate from high school, they’re starting to worry.
How does it feel to be pioneers?
“It sucks,” Jennifer said.
So the two have started a Web site with an online petition that seeks to abolish the WASL tests, as well as give a voice to students and adults who share their concerns.
“We’d like to show Washington state how many people disapprove” of the tests, Ryland said. “The people designing it never had to take it.”
As these two students can attest, taking the WASL isn’t easy.
“It’s hard, stressful,” Jennifer said.
Test questions are challenging. But the hype and tense atmosphere of the testing period don’t help, they said.
“We’re in a classroom for about 21/2 hours with the door closed, and everyone is silent,” Ryland said. “Before the test, you’re thinking about how you’re going to do. But once you start it, you start to worry. Are people going faster than you? Are you going to be the last to finish?”
Ryland and Jennifer are not alone in their concerns. Other anti-WASL sentiments have started creeping into online chat rooms and Web logs, or blogs.
It’s not just teenagers from the test-tube Class of 2008 that are concerned. Local members of the statewide Mothers Against WASL remain active since staging picket lines two years ago, coordinator Tobey Gloss said.
Several volunteers are researching how to file a class-action lawsuit against the state if diplomas are denied to students who don’t pass the test. Members also are hoping to organize a protest day in March, with people wearing red shirts to school or work to show their opposition to the test, she said.
Meanwhile, Gloss has pulled her eighth-grade son from school in favor of home-schooling. Her son has special needs that make it difficult for him to do basic math, such as counting money. But under the law, Gloss said he would still have to pass the 10th-grade WASL, including the algebra portion.
Other parents are acting alone.
Ronda Howard of Arlington has been lobbying state education leaders and local lawmakers to remove the WASL graduation requirement.
“I don’t believe the WASL is all that bad. I just don’t like all these stipulations and restrictions placed on students like my daughter who are good students … but are at risk of not earning a diploma because they can’t pass this test,” Howard said.
Standardized tests are unlikely to disappear.
In the November election, three challengers ran on anti-WASL platforms to unseat Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson, but without success.
In 2000, one-half of 1 percent of the state’s 10th-graders chose to opt out of the WASL math test, a trend that rose in 2004 to 2 percent of 10th-graders, or 1,454 students.
With the new graduation requirement, refusing to take the test is no longer an option for the Class of 2008 and beyond if a student wants a diploma.
WASL helps schools track how well they are preparing students for life after graduation, said Paula Koehler, executive director of curriculum for the Snohomish School District.
As for being tied to a diploma? “The parents would need to talk to the people in Olympia about that,” she said.
Ryland and Jennifer on Tuesday plan to hang neon-colored “Stop the WASL” posters in school hallways.
Although she does not oppose the tests, Ryland’s mother, Debbie Hammer, said the pressure it puts on students such as her son saddens her.
“For Ryland and a lot of his fellow classmates, they all sort of seem to be getting this gloomy sense that they’re not going to make it,” Hammer said.
“As a parent, I hate to see that as a specter over his educational experience. … I don’t want to see him give up before he’s even really started.”
The Web site has given Ryland, Jennifer and others an outlet and a sense of empowerment, Hammer said. “It’s a little civics lesson. And it’s a positive step.”
Reporter Melissa Slager: 425-339-3465 or mslager@heraldnet.com.
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