BRUNSWICK COUNTY — Brunswick County Schools is expanding its credit recovery options to offer struggling high schoolers more opportunity to learn course content and avoid a failing grade.
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The Brunswick County Board of Education heard a presentation on renewing a software contract and policy change practices during last Tuesday’s committee meetings. Both will be voted on at an upcoming board meeting.
The district, as required by the state, already offers credit recovery for students that fail a course by no more than 10 points; anything below that would require the entire course to be retaken.
Brunswick County Schools uses the online software Edmentum to administer and test on course content. After the semester ends, students with a failing grade are placed in a credit recovery class the next semester or over the summer. Assistant Superintendent Jonathan Pascal said students in credit recovery normally complete it in half a semester.
Now, Pascal is introducing learning recovery, where specific online modules — not a full credit recovery course — would be assigned to address students’ grades before a semester’s end or in cases of excess absences.
Learning recovery will be assigned in the following circumstances:
- If a student is failing in the semester’s first quarter
- If a student has more than 10 unexcused absences in a semester
Pascal explained Brunswick County Schools’ practice has been to issue a student a grade of 50 in the first quarter, even if the student earned below that, to avoid tanking a student’s grade so far it could never recover.
“[Issuing a 50] could breed a little complacency, maybe in the first quarter, and therefore maybe not as much of a sense of urgency to learn all the material,” Assistant Superintendent Jonathan Pascal said. “And then when you get to the second semester, and we’ve given you this gift of a 50 and you had no extra work to earn it, you’re lacking the knowledge from the first quarter.”
Now, students will be given the opportunity to earn the 50 through learning recovery. The students would be assigned only the modules they didn’t understand or missed during the first quarter to retake, with the goal of promoting mastery of the material.
“I definitely don’t want our students to think they don’t have a chance to pass; so, now they get to earn a chance to pass,” Pascal said.
If students still fail the course, earning a grade between 50 and 60, they would then have to take the whole credit recovery course.
Learning recovery will also be implemented for students who accrue more than 10 unexcused absences during the year. Superintendent Dale Cole said a recent policy change at the state level prevents school districts from issuing Fs to students with attendance issues, instead allowing for the course to be marked incomplete.
“I’m not aware of any school district in North Carolina that has seen more improvement in its high-school attendance rate than Brunswick County Schools over the last year…so rather than just throwing up his hands and getting mad about it, Mr. Pascal went to work with our high school principals to come up with an innovative way to come up with some new teeth for our attendance policy,” Cole said.
Students would be given 20 days to complete the credit recovery to remove the incomplete from their report card. If the modules were not completed or failed, then the district can then issue an F.
“We can’t fail them just because they missed so we would fail them because they didn’t do the work,” Pascal said.
The district has been using Edmentum software in credit recovery for several years, which utilizes Brunswick Virtual Academy to assign targeted lessons for remediation. The platform is also used for students who may be homebound due to injury or other circumstances.
The contract renewal, to run through 2028, will add on Study Island. It offers practice for content in core subject areas, along with real-time data and progress monitoring for teachers.
The entire contract will be $109,000 annually.
Board of Education members asked a few clarifying questions during Tuesday’s meeting, but didn’t take issue with the policy and contract changes. The item will be placed on the consent agenda for the board’s Aug. 5 meeting.
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