New review day and exam procedures announced

The administration has implemented new policies regarding semester finals in preparation for the upcoming exam week. Students are now officially allowed to go home after their first exam and the usual eight-period review day has been replaced with two full-period review days on Thursday and Friday, according to Assistant Principal Linda Wanner.

Although students no longer have to attend a second-block non-exam period, teachers will be in their classrooms available to students who need somewhere to stay. "If they want to stay they can stay," Wanner said. "Teachers will be in the building if students don't have anywhere to go."

Despite the extended time on the review days, the administration has discouraged Thursday and Friday testing. "Teachers should be using this day for review only," Wanner said. "They should not be able to give tests before exam day either, that's just not fair."

These changes come in response to scheduling confusion and review anxieties in the Blair community. Both teachers and students mutually expressed concern over the lack of time there was for review under the previous schedule, and many were unsure of the exact parameters of the exam attendance policy, Wanner said. Under the previous policy, exam days had been scheduled as half days, which required teachers to keep their students until the end of the day.

In previous years some teachers kept their students while others released them if they had no exam; the informal policy of keeping students in the building from 7:25 a.m. until 12 p.m. was seldom followed and barely known, according to Wanner. "We know we can't enforce a policy requiring all kids to go to class after an exam when there is nothing there to do," she said. "Especially when students hardly knew this policy existed; we just couldn't make kids stay."