Feb. 10—Third-grade students won’t be the only ones worrying about retention as Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program testing season approaches.

The Wilson County School District sent out a communication to parents about the existing third grade promotion law, and about the options for their child should the student not meet the required score. However, third graders are not the only ones at risk of being retained due to their test scores. Fourth graders are also at risk.

“For our fourth graders, this is new this year,” Wilson County Schools Deputy Director of Academics Jennifer Cothron said. “This is where I think we’re struggling a bit, is the students last year that were in third grade, who were scoring below or approaching (proficient) but did all the required items that we asked. They attended tutoring. They attended summer school with a 90% attendance rate and they were promoted to fourth grade. Those students are now at risk of being retained in fourth grade if they don’t make adequate growth.”

Adequate growth has yet to be defined by the state, but Cothron said that it’s a calculation based upon the probability of the students scoring at the “met expectations” level over the next eight years.

“We have about 180 students in our district who are in fourth grade right now who will need to make adequate growth on the fourth grade English Language Arts T-CAP before they can be promoted to fifth grade,” Cothron said.

Unlike their third-grade counterparts, students who don’t show adequate growth will not have the option to go through an appeals process.

“We have to go by the rules that we know even if they’re not finalized and that’s what we’re doing,” Zone 7 board member Jamie Farough said.

Additional safety measures for Wilson County

The Wilson County School District will be implementing weapons detection systems in schools.

“Many schools around us have it in adjoining counties,” Wilson County Director of Schools Jeff Luttrell said. “We’re starting at looking to cover our high schools. We’re going to pilot (the system) a high school — Wilson Central.”

Training for staff will begin in the next few days and the process of piloting the system will begin.

“There will be some adjustments that need to be made,” Luttrell said. “We don’t have the date set for exactly when it’ll start but we are in that process.”

Luttrell said that the system will help ensure that students coming into the building will have no weapons on their persons.

“I’ve looked into a lot of things,” Luttrell said. “I’ve had a tremendous amount of vendors in. We’ve met with them and (Wilson County Schools Deputy Director of Operations Travis) Mayfield has met with a lot of them. There’s a lot of good ideas out there, but I keep going back to (how) we’ve got to prevent (weapons) from getting in the building. That’s the key. This is what I believe is the first step. There’ll be some other layers in the future with cameras and some other things that we’ll be doing to ensure our safety on our campuses as much as possible.”