Pinellas County school leaders propose exam exemption policy changes

PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) — Pinellas County School leaders are working on getting more kids in the classroom.

Their latest idea is to alter the exam exemption policy.

“You used to need an ‘A’ or ‘B’ in both quarters to be exempt from the exam and we’ve actually changed that to include ‘C’.”

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School leaders will present the proposal to the community on Tuesday, April 23 for its first reading. The meeting will be at the district office in Largo.

“I can see a lot more people paying attention and saying, ‘Wow, that’s something that’s reachable for me,'” Area 4 Superintendent Michael Vigue said. “That average student might have said before ‘I’m not going to try to exempt exams’ because it might have been viewed as out of reach.”

Under current policy, students can only be exempt from certain exams if they make the grade for it and miss fewer than five classes in total.

School leaders want to change it to be determined by the student’s grade and the student needs to have less than five absences in the particular class they wish to avoid the exam.

“I can imagine being a high school principal and standing in front of my students at the start of the school year about the importance of engaging academically and this great opportunity to exempt exams with the threshold of a ‘C.”

School leaders like Vigue believe it would also be beneficial if students could be exempt from exams in both semesters and decided to include that in the proposal too.

“These minor changes are just good for kids,” Vigue said.

They could be the reality by fall.

What won’t change is that exemptions still won’t apply to IB, AP, and AICE courses, or any state-required end-of-course exams.

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