The public will find out on September 24th just how many high school seniors may be in danger of not graduating this year because they haven't passed the High School Assessments in biology, English, American government and Algebra. That is the date of the next board meeting when the state says it will be releasing the results. 

The state has already released individual student test results to all the school systems. Now the local systems are in the process of looking at all their seniors and sorting out which ones haven't passed the end of course exams and may have to do a project called the Bridge Plan to make up for those failures so they can graduate on time.

Board members made it clear yesterday though that they may still have reservations about going ahead with such a plan to require students to pass the tests to get a diploma. One board member suggested he was looking forward to having another in depth discussion about the issue and that he still didn't support linking the tests to the diploma.

What is different this year? The makeup of the state board has changed. We now have three new board members who were appointed in July by Gov. Martin O'Malley. He's not a big fan of Nancy Grasmick, as some of you may remember, and these assessments are very important to Grasmick. So it has yet to be seen whether Grasmick will get more pushback on the HSAs this year than she did last fall when the school board supported her.