Opting in or opting out?

With state exams set to start next Tuesday, many parents in Rockville Centre are deciding whether their children will take them.

The school district has been a hotbed of the “opt-out” movement, with nearly half of its eligible students choosing not to sit for the exams last year — the majority of them at South Side Middle School.

Donna Barrett, co-president of the Riverside PTA, said that after presenting both sides of the issue to its membership, the PTA saw an increase in the number of people who planned to keep their children out of the exams. “You had people who were definitely opting out, and then people who were still nervous to opt out,” she said. “Most of the people are nervous because they don’t know what the ramifications are later on.”

The answer to that looming question is still unclear. District Superintendent Dr. William Johnson has said there would be no direct impact on students who opt out, and that the district does not use the state exams to determine whether students need extra help. Rather, its focus is the Northwest Evaluation Association exams.

Most of the concerns are expressed by teachers, whose Annual Professional Performance Review is based in part on how students perform on the exams.

Under Rockville Centre’s APPR policy, 60 percent of a teacher’s review score is based on classroom observation, and the remaining 40 percent is split evenly between student performance on state exams and the NWEA. In his 2015-16 budget, Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed making the ration 50/50 and giving much more weight to state tests, but that plan did not pass, though the specifics of a new APPR plan are still unclear.

It was the emphasis on the state tests that led Barrett to decide to opt her fifth- and seventh-graders out of them. “I don’t think it’s fair, especially when you’re not looking at the whole child,” she said. “You’re not looking at special needs or demographics, you’re just looking at a name and result. And I don’t think that’s fair to the teacher.”