By Heather Michon
Correspondent
Members of the Fluvanna County School Board voiced strong opposition to new state educational polices around Standards of Learning (SOL) testing and new textbook mandates during its monthly meeting on Wednesday night (May 14).
Earlier this year, the General Assembly in Richmond passed a new bill mandating that SOL test scores account for at least 10 percent of a student’s year-end grade starting in the 2026-27 school year. Gov. Glenn Youngkin recently signed the bill into law.
This new policy will move the SOLs to the last two weeks of the academic year and transition from a 600-point scale to a 100-point scale.
Supporters of the policy change have argued that it will eliminate a month of instructional time focused on the tests, which are currently administered more than a month before end of the school year, and the 100-point scale will make results easier to interpret.
By tying the test scores to final grades, supporters believe that students will be more incentivized to retain information throughout the year, rather than focusing on learning for the stand-alone test.
Students who fail the test will have the opportunity to re-test before final grades are calculated.
“I think that the folks who drafted this don’t have a real good handle on what it looks like,” said Superintendent Peter Gretz, “and trying to get all the different populations tested and re-tested, and I don’t know what that looks like, either.”
Board members agreed.
“You can take the greatest GPA student in the world and put them in a standardized testing environment, and you see a completely different student on paper,” said Danny Reed (Fork Union).
James Kelley (Palmyra) said “this doubles down on what is effectively an American learned behavior, which is this asinine standardized test taking. It doesn’t serve our students, it doesn’t serve our teachers. I’m not sure who it ultimately serves.”
Reed wondered what would happen if a district decided to opt out of the SOLs. “Is it 60 percent of our budget disappears if we just don’t do standardized testing from the state?”
Members were also concerned about new textbook requirements that could end up costing the district $200,000 to $300,000 in the next couple of years. Gretz said he and other superintendents were working to get more clarity on what would be required and whether the state would provide some funding.
The issue brought a rare moment of unanimity for the board members, as chair Andrew Pullen asked if they would help draft and co-sign a letter to the state.
“It’s no secret that I’m pretty conservative and voted for the guy [Youngkin], but I think these issues he’s failing us left and right,” Pullen said. “So I think when you see unanimous support from a board like ours, which is wildly different in our political persuasion, if we send a letter like that to them, I think maybe, maybe we’ll get some attention.”
