Three-quarters of Bellmore-Merrick students opt-out of ELA test

The Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District again had among the highest percentages of students in Nassau County opting out of the state English Language Arts exams last week, with 73 percent of seventh- and eighth-grade students sitting out the exams.

According to Superintendent John DeTommaso, the district had the second-highest percentage of non-participating students.

At the same time, 70 percent of students in the Bellmore Elementary School District opted out of the exam over the three days that it was administered.

As reported by the Herald in 2014, the opt-out movement” began as a small, grass roots social-media campaign in North Bellmore and rapidly spread statewide, with parents demanding that the state scale back the number of exams and their difficulty. Many parents argued that the exams, based on the Common Core State Standards, are one to two grade levels above their children’s abilities.

North Bellmore mother Jeanette Deutermann founded the group Long Island Opt Out, which, along with the New York Alliance for Public Education, the Badass Teachers Association and United Opt Out, sparked much of the national movement, according to a Columbia University study.

Deutermann said this weekthat this year’s opt-out numbers show that parents “are not backing down.”

“It’s not just a test itself,” she said. “It’s what [Common Core] does the entire year. My son was in the grade where everything flooded in at the same time. We saw the changes in our kids. We saw their reactions to it. It was beyond frustration. It was complete shutdown. We watched them struggle through work that was completely grade-level inappropriate.

“The state has an option,” Deutermann added. “They make little tweaks to the tests here and there … but parents are really researching and following and learning what these tests are and what they’re not.”

On Monday, DeTommaso called the Central District’s — and Long Island’s — opt-out numbers “an incredible movement by parents,” and said that Central administrators don’t believe a single assessment can give “the full picture of how a kid is doing throughout the year.

“To me, it doesn’t give a true picture of not only the child’s performance, but the true picture of a building’s performance,” DeTommaso added. “There’s more to it than that. There’s a heck of a lot more to it.”

Although the state has continued to make revisions to the tests, DeTommaso said, “In many people’s minds it’s not enough.”

“I think it’s parents’ prerogative to make the decision of whether their student is going to take a test or not,” he added. “If a student wants to take the test, then great, we’ll do that. If they don’t want to take the test, that’s great too.”

And with such high numbers of students across Long Island opting out, DeTomasso said, “Do you test in Bellmore-Merrick when 27 or 28 percent of the kids take the exam? If the opt-outs are such a significant number of kids, is there a validity to the test? I would probably lean toward no.”

The State Board of Regents approved a four-year moratorium in 2015 on using the annual state tests for students in grades three to eight for teacher evaluations or student promotion, which was among the 21 recommendations that a 15-member, governor-appointed task force came up with for re-evaluating the Common Core standards. The ban will last until the 2019-2020 school year.