Honors-for-All proposed for Annapolis HS

In an effort to close the achievement gap between students at Annapolis High School, Principal Don Lilley will be implementing a new Board of Education-approved program: Honors for All. The idea for Honors for All is based on the idea that by placing all incoming freshmen into honors level courses, students who would normally be considered standard-level are offered the chance to excel into a higher level of learning. For students who feel they’re grades would suffer through this sudden jump in class difficulty, seminar courses will be set up to aide any student in need of remedial help.

This plan comes about in the wake of the recent class scores from Annapolis and Bates Middle Schools, suggesting that roughly 20 percent of their students received D’s or E’s in their social studies and science classes.  In the January 11 presentation revealing the new plan, the consensus of many parents was that this may lead to a “watering down” of the once-rigorous honors classes. “My worry is that these new heterogeneous classes will leave my child bored in class as the teacher tries to calm down the students needing discipline,” said one worried mother.

This new policy will be enacted at Annapolis in the fall of 2012, under the eye of the school research team at the University of Maryland.