WILBRAHAM — With less than a month to go before the Nov. 5 general election, the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School Committee voted to support the passage of ballot Question 2, which would repeal the high school graduation requirement for passing the MCAS test.
The ballot question, which has drawn overwhelming support from the Massachusetts Teachers Association and derision from a statewide coalition known as “Protect Our Kids’ Future: No on Question 2,” is one of five questions that will land on this year’s ballot.
The Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School Committee voted 4-1 in favor of supporting the passage of the ballot question.
“It has narrowed our scope of education,” said School Committee member Tim Collins, regarding the MCAS test. “It’s one of the reasons why art and music, civics, shop, home careers, visual education, health, have either been eliminated in some schools … or severely limited.”
Collins shares a similar view to Deb McCarthy, the president of MTA and fifth grade teacher of 25 years, who argued that the focus of the education system in Massachusetts should be on facilitating an academically rich environment rather than on narrowing the focus on one standardized test.
“MCAS isn’t a standard, it’s an assessment,” McCarthy said. “And we do assessments all the time, from September through June, and we believe that our students need to be measured on the process of these 10 months and not a one-time event.”
Instead of having MCAS as a graduation requirement, the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School Committee voted that requirement to earn a diploma instead be the certification that students “have satisfactorily completed coursework demonstrating mastery of the skills and knowledge required by the commonwealth’s strong statewide standards in order to graduate.”
In his remarks, School Committee member Michael Tirabassi also expressed support for the committee’s resolution. He emphasized that fact that earning a high school diploma in a school district is a testament to the hard work put forth by students and teachers, regardless of the MCAS test.
“I don’t have any problems with individual school districts defining what they think should be the criteria for a student to achieve a high school diploma,” Tirabassi said. “I think a high school diploma means a lot … What doesn’t mean anything is whether or not the student passed the MCAS.”
School Committee member Richard Rediker, the lone person to vote against the resolution, did not explicitly support the MCAS as a graduation requirement in his remarks, but he broadly argued that it is important that students need to meet rigorous standards to graduate high school.
He added that there should be some statewide requirement at the end of the school year that shows that students can complete basic tasks involving reading and writing.
“I believe that as a business owner, as somebody that works with schools, somebody that used to be a teacher myself, that we should have rigorous standards to get out,” Rediker said. “I feel very strongly… that if somebody comes to my office and says, ‘I have a high school diploma,’ I know they can do certain things.”
Ballot Question 2 landed on this year’s election after the MTA gathered over 130,000 signatures across the state from those who support eliminating the MCAS as a graduation requirement. The MTA officially backed the question in an announcement in August 2023.
