GALLATIN, Tenn. (WTVF) — Students at Howard Elementary School's summer program are here to learn, but for just a few moments Tuesday, they were called upon to teach Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and an entourage of state officials what these programs are like.
"My name is Bill Lee, and I’m the governor," Lee said to the class. "We wanted to come out and look at a model of what was happening across the state with summer programming."
But many parents of third graders say they're frustrated their students are here in the first place.
Under the state's new Third Grade Retention Law, students who perform below grade level on their TCAP Language Arts test must attend summer school and receive tutoring next school year to avoid repeating the third grade.
Gov. Lee said he's sympathetic to parents who don't like seeing their kids singled out.
"It’s really hard. Those are difficult situations that people find themselves in, but what’s even harder is watching their kids fail in the future," Lee said. "The worst thing we can do is push them up into upper grades not being able to read. And so we’ve created pathways to success for these parents and these children."
House Democratic Caucus Chairman, Rep. John Ray Clemmons, calls the Third Grade Retention Law a failure and wants to change course.
"Let’s get smaller classroom sizes, Universal Pre-K, and benchmark these kids throughout the process instead of just putting all of this emphasize on one single standardized test," Clemmons said.
We asked Gov. Lee if he was pleased with the way the Third Grade Retention Law is right now or would he want to make adjustments.
"I like the law as it has been put into place, but we’ll certainly watch it going forward," Lee said. "We should do that for every piece of legislation."
State lawmakers did make a few adjustments to the Third Grade Retention Law for next year, like letting another benchmark test score also be used to determine a student's status.
