It is with complete dismay that I read your article regarding attendance, grades and being excused from finals.
I am an OHS grad from 1984 and have three sons in the school system. My oldest informed me about this policy when he was a freshman at OHS.
My question to the Principal, to Dr. Skilling and to anyone who will listen is, ‘What are you teaching our children and how are you preparing them for higher education??
It is not a question of a minimum GPA, attendance, or any level of achievement that a student reaches. This becomes a question of how Dr. Skilling’s body of work (the student body) performs at the next level and that they are not being given the tools to do so.
No college will allow you to skip a final, at least none where you have to attend class.
Dr. Skilling, don’t you see that by having the children take finals, you are training them on how to do so?
Further, what college professor will accept, ‘I never had to take a final in high school? as the student’s response to failing a final?
In short, taking finals should be mandatory for every child as it helps them learn how to study for, and take finals in the future.
The system as it is now is not training our children for the next level, it is moving our children through and out, at which time great success is proclaimed by educators.
I suggest that Dr. Skilling, and the school system should be evaluated by how many of our children succeed in their first year and attend their second year of college, not how many they move through the Oxford system.
Larry Schultz
1984 Oxford High School graduate