Caldwell County School requires its students to take five English courses before graduation. Four of the five courses are selected and mandated by the state (English I-IV). The fifth English is mandated by our county and they created a course called Communication Skills. The course originally was sequenced to occur at the beginning of a student’s freshmen year during the fall semester. Students were then scheduled to take English I in the spring. English I, at that time, had an End-of-Course test, so it gave students county-wide a year to prep for the state exam. In recent years, the End-of-Course exam has been removed from English I and replaced with the English II exam. However, Communication Skills has never changed sequence. Now, years later, the curriculum now mandates that every junior take the ACT. Since Communication Skills is designed primarily to teach grammar and mechanics, there has been a suggestion to move this course to the fall of a student’s junior year to help them be successful on the grammar and writing portion of the ACT.

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What is your stance on this issue?
I am actually the one who made the initial suggestion to move the course sequence for Communication Skills to a student’s junior year. I gathered school-wide data of our students’ PLAN results (PreACT) and previous ACT results and discovered that our students are doing excellent in the area of reading, but are doing awful in the area of English which is primarily grammar, mechanics, and writing. I talked with the high school director, the associate superintendent, and other high school principals during a principal’s meeting and they expressed similar concerns across the district.

5. Who are the people, or groups, who care about the issue at hand? Are they the same people that you named in #1? If not, add them to your list. Consider: will the persons named in #1 care enough to support or oppose you and/or your