Imagine searching through the Boothbay Register to find the list of every student who made the honor roll, where you, your parents, and your grandparents expect to find your name listed, only to discover that somehow you didn’t make the cut.

At BRHS, honor roll requires all class grades to be at least an 80 for honors and a 90 for high honors. This means that even if you have all 95s except for a single class at even a 79, you would be prevented from being an honors student. The 80 minimum grade is true for all classes except AP and early college courses for which the minimum grade is 74.5 for honors and 84.5 for high honors.

In my case, even though the average of my semester one grades was a 93 this year, I did not receive honors distinction because my grade in AP English Language was a 77. The current policy should have kicked in to give me a little bit of wiggle room for my AP course, but it did not and it hasn’t for many of my other classmates. Through this letter my aim is not to ridicule the staff who assign honor roll to students, but instead make sure consistency is guaranteed.

While ensuring uniformity when awarding honor roll recognition is at the forefront of this initiative, I have another proposal. I request completely rewriting the honor roll policy, changing the requirement from having each grade be at least an 80 to having the average of your semester grades be at least an 85 for honors and a 95 for high honors. This would not be too much of a foreign concept since the school already has to calculate which students have an average of at least 85 to determine potential candidates for the National Honor Society. It would make sense if the honor roll and National Honor Society shared some common requirements.

Although the above change may make the honor roll seem less “special” because a greater number of students would make the cut, a very high percentage of students already make the honor roll.

According to a survey that I sent out to the entire student body earlier this year, 70.2% of the 84 responses (about half of the total student population) responded that they had received some form of honor roll recognition at BRHS. This is already quite a large number of students, proving that receiving the honor roll title is not as “special” as it seems. I also asked in my survey whether students would make the honor roll if BRHS based recognition on the average of all grades rather than on each individual grade. Of the 82 responses, 82.9% of students said “yes.” With only an increase of a little more than 10%, I would argue that the change in this statistic is small enough to prevent much concern. Keep in mind that the students answering this survey are also basing their answers on the current minimum grade of 80, but in my proposal, I changed the minimum average to 85 to counteract the higher potential achievement rate.

Another question I asked in my survey was whether students were held back from achieving honor roll because of only one or two classes, and one third of the 84 responses said they were. A change like I have proposed would benefit all these students who are strong scholars but still have a class they struggle with. It acknowledges overall academic performance even if they face some small challenges.

Regarding my proposal to base honor roll on semester averages, Emily Higgins, a science teacher at BRHS, said that the idea could work. She suggested raising the minimum average even higher than 85, but I believe that if the change is made too suddenly or dramatically, it may be less likely to be adopted. When I asked Leanne Burnham, our guidance director, whether a system based on averages rather than individual grades would be possible, she said, “I hadn’t really considered this before. It’s definitely an interesting idea!”

Ultimately, BRHS should alter the current policy to recognize students more consistently and fairly. Either change the requirement for honor roll to be the average grade of academic classes, or, at bare minimum, ensure that weighted classes (AP and early college) are uniformly recognized. This would assure that all students, who work hard and perform well overall, will be included in the recognition they deserve.