Leon School Board members say the Florida Department of Education is downplaying the extent and impact of system outages that affected this year’s Spring exams. And they say they want to be certain the system failures that plagued the rollout of the new computer-based Florida Standards Assessment are fixed.
Board member Alva Swafford Striplin is upset by comments she says were made by state education officials at a school board association conference.
“They’re still maintaining, very loudly to a room that wasn’t very happy, that only 2/10ths of one percent of students were adversely affected by the testing in the state of Florida. The room was up in arms and if we’d had tomatoes we’d probably have thrown them. It was not a very well received comment.”
The Leon County School District was one of several across the state that suspended school testing this Spring due to problems with the computer-based platform. The state has launched a review of the Florida Standards Assessment to see if it’s a valid test of student skills.
