DISTRICTS TACKLE WAYS TO HELP KIDS MAKE GRADE; SOCIAL PROMOTION OR RETENTION POSE EDUCATION DILEMMA.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

Teachers and parents have long wrestled with the question of whether it's better for a student struggling in school to be passed along to the next grade level or held back to repeat the work another year.

Will such students learn the academic material the second time around, with an extra year of growth and maturity? Or will they be so demoralized by having fallen behind those their age that ever catching up is unlikely?

A new state law addresses that dilemma, taking much of the decision out of the public schools' hands while instead directing them to provide remedial measures that will help failing students get back on course.

Assembly Bill 1626, which took effect Jan. 1, requires school boards to adopt policies about which students will be promoted to the next grade and which will be retained for another year. The new law also requires the state schools superintendent and state board of education to adopt minimum academic performance standards that students must meet to be promoted.

Statistics on social promotion are hard to come by, mainly because public schools don't want to concede that students sometimes are passed to the next grade even though their grades didn't merit it. The closest barometer of how many students aren't meeting minimum standards is the data on retentions.

School districts haven't been required to keep records of retention or social promotion, but some do so out of curiosity.

In the William S. Hart Union High School District, for example, about 170 eighth-graders - out of 2,235 total in the class of '98 - didn't meet the standards for junior high graduation but were promoted to ninth grade nonetheless, said Leslie Crunelle, assistant superintendent of educational services for Hart.

That's about 7.6 percent of last spring's eighth grade class. In 1996, the only other year for which data were available, 259 eighth-graders didn't meet the graduation standards, Crunelle said.

In the Saugus Union School District, meanwhile, administrators tracked retention and found that it ran about 1 percent. Of the 8,000 or so students enrolled in the district's 12 schools, 85 were held back during the 1997-98 school year, said Joan Lucid, assistant superintendent of instruction for Saugus.

``For the most part, those children tended to be kindergartners or first-graders,'' Lucid said. The reason for that pattern is students' problems generally become evident early on.

``By the time we've gotten them to the upper grade levels, we really understand that child, and they're not being promoted just for (the sake of) being promoted,'' Lucid said. ``Our teachers have done an outstanding job of monitoring children's progress.''

Generally, students who have the ability to catch up aren't held back. ``With our limited-English children, we certainly don't want to retain them just because they're learning the language,'' Lucid said.

With the new law in effect, Saugus and other districts will be concretely outlining who will pass and who won't. Every effort will be made to alert parents and students early in the school year so that remedies can be tried to correct the problem, Lucid said.

``We don't want children passed along who will leave our school system and won't be successful,'' she said. But children progress at different paces, and some youngsters benefit from repeating a grade - if the situation is viewed as an opportunity for improvement rather than a mark of shame, Lucid said.

``You have some children who walk at 9 months and some who walk at 14 months,'' she said.

``You have to make individual decisions . . . (and be sure) that the child doesn't have bad feelings that they flunked the grade . . . that they've been bad in some way. Given the gift of time, that child generally will come along,'' Lucid said.

``We don't want people to view this as punitive. It really is designed to make sure that children leaving the school system are prepared for the next grade level.''

The law emphasizes the transitions between sixth and seventh grades, and between eighth and ninth grades.

The standards for promotion to high school have a narrow gap between the maximum credits a student can earn in junior high - 120 - and the minimum credits - 107.5 - to pass, Crunelle said.

The 170 eighth-graders who didn't earn enough credits weren't allowed to take part in junior high graduations but were sent to high school. ``Students, particularly at that age level, have not been retained because the research tells us it does not work,'' Crunelle explained.

``Students become the most at-risk for dropping out. There's a huge body of research that supports that,'' she added.

A new state law won't erase the fact that some students have trouble in school, but Crunelle said a Hart district program that will begin in the fall will try to make sure those youths prepare themselves for high school.

Such eighth-grade graduates will be channeled into the ninth-grade transition program. Classes will be small, perhaps one teacher for every 22 students. And the ninth-graders will attend school away from the Canyon, Hart, Saugus or Valencia campuses, at a site still to be determined, Crunelle said.

The ninth-graders will learn study skills, receive tutoring and take their academic subjects together. And they will have contact with 10th-grade teachers to ease any anxiety about joining the general high school population the next year, she said.

``Here's what happens to ninth-graders when they enter high school. They have six different teachers. They have a counselor who sees them once or twice a year. And they are one of 130 to 150 students that a teacher sees each day,'' Crunelle said. ``That does not promote individual connection.''

Their own reviews of students who are failing in school showed that, while some had discipline problems, some had poor attendance and others had learning difficulties, there was a common thread most shared, Crunelle said.

``What seems to be consistent is that students felt no adult really knew them or was connected to them. If that's true in junior high . . . it's only going to be exacerbated in high school,'' Crunelle said.

``Our solution is to improve their skills to make the program as `un-anonymous' as possible . . . by giving them a very small environment for a year, with lots of support.''