Your Dollars at Work!

This past month we were able to fund almost $8,000 in Teacher Grants and $1,000 for Student Organization /Club grants. Your dollars put more calculators, reference books & dvd’s into our Classrooms, just to name a few. It also helps pay for various activities held at our school. These dollars are used to touch as many students in the school as possible so that all of them will benefit from the money that we raise as a PTSA. Each year we ask the staff and student organizations to apply for grant money and we try and fund as many of them as we can. With your help we continue to make our school great!

The emails and letters PAID OFF!!!
Thank you to everyone who took the time to send them an email!

New GPA proposal would provide Texas students more credit for some advanced courses 03:20 PM CDT on Wednesday, October 22, 2008 By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News tstutz@dallasnews.com

AUSTIN -- State Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes today agreed to adjust his proposed uniform grade point average rules for Texas high schools in response to widespread complaints from superintendents, principals and teachers.

Under a plan recommended by Dr. Paredes to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, students would get a half point of extra credit for pre-Advanced Placement and pre-International Baccalaureate courses in the 4.0 grading scale for all students.

Dr. Paredes also proposed creation of an advisory committee to examine specific courses and recommend those that should be included in the calculations for student GPAs, beginning with incoming high school freshmen in the fall of 2009.

"We have made substantial adjustments in the proposal," Dr. Paredes told board members, referring to his earlier plan that would have denied extra weight in GPAs for all pre-AP and pre-IB courses, as well as most classes in fine arts and career and technical education.

Critics had said that the plan would "dumb down" the coursework of students, discouraging them from taking the more rigorous pre-AP and pre-IB courses because they would count the same as regular classes.

His proposal would still give an additional point for AP, IB and Dual Credit (high school and college) classes so that an A in those classes would be equal to 5.0 and a B would be equal to 4.0 in computing GPAs. Student GPAs are important in college admissions, particularly under Texas' top 10 percent rule for automatic admission to flagship universities.

"I don't want to dumb down courses. I want to raise every student to rigorous coursework that leads to post-secondary success," Dr. Paredes said. "Our goal is to promote rigor and higher standards for all high school students."

Board members decided to postpone final action on the GPA recommendations until their next meeting in January.

The uniform GPA rules were mandated by the Legislature last year in response to widely different policies among school districts in calculating their student GPAs.