SANTA FE (KRQE) – More students, parents and teachers standing up against PARCC, the state’s new online standardized test. It caused a disturbance at one school Thursday morning where a student at Capshaw Middle School in Santa Fe said she was disciplined for taking a stand.
“It’s setting us up for failure,” Adelina Silva said. “My goal here was to just let the parents know that they have the option.”
Adelina Silva, an 8th-grader at Capshaw, said she was handing out the opt-out forms Thursday when suddenly staff stepped in.
“They started pulling the fliers out from the kids’ hands,” she said.
That’s when Silva said he was pulled in to the principal’s office.
“And I was waiting there for over an hour and 20 minutes wasting my class time.”
The form she was handing out is available on the Santa Fe Public School’s website.
“I was very upset when I heard this,” her mother, Jacqueline Ellvinger said. “Parents need to know that this form is online and they are able to opt their children out of it.”
Ellvinger also chose to opt-out her son.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said of PARCC “Our children’s education is being based off a test.”
Thursday afternoon, students at Capshaw organized a sit-in, leaving their classrooms and going to the hallways to protest.
KRQE News 13 spoke with another parent who had much different thoughts on the test, which will be used to grade teachers and schools.
“Parents allowing them to do this is absolutely wrong,” LisaAnn Greigo-Acuna said of the protests. “(The test) will help them whether they believe it or not today but it will help them tomorrow.”
In wake of recent protests, and threats of more, Albuquerque Public Schools posted to their website Wednesday that any unexcused absence will result in a zero. The post also said “they haven’t turned a deaf ear to the many opinions on PARCC testing, but the fact remains that the tests are mandatory.”
According to the state’s teacher union, it feels as teachers are trying to be silenced.
It said in the Fall, the Public Education Department told teachers they aren’t allowed to criticize the test. The union responded by saying their First Amendment rights were being attacked.
The PED denied the union’s claims and said it only told teachers not to talk about what’s on the test.
KRQE News 13 wanted comment on the 8th-grader claiming she was punished for handing out opt-out forms. Santa Fe Public Schools did not get back to us. Ellvinger said that as of 4 p.m. Thursday, her daughter, Adelina, had been suspended for one day.
