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Health & Fitness

School's PSAT special Treatment: "Blue Ticket" Testing

What’ll you have?

If you are testing at Plant City High School be sure and try their Blue Ticket PSAT Special. It is not in the cafeteria, it’s served in their Media Center with a selection of snacks and refreshments. But it’s not for everyone; only select students are treated to this special, dare we say non-standard treatment for what should be a standardized testing.

The PSAT is the Preliminary SAT (a.k.a. PSAT/NMSQT or National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test) and is a standardized test administered by the College Board and National Merit Scholarship Corporation. The key word being standardized which is generally understood to mean that it is being administered the same to all.

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It has come to our attention that when Plant City High School served up its PSAT last month it had some special trimmings for the top performing students. Approximately 30 of the top performing students were given special blue tickets and treated to a special ‘Blue Ticket’ treatment complete with a special location in the Media Center with snacks and refreshments.

Not only that, but this ‘Blue Ticket’ treatment was done without any notification of the parents. Despite that lack of notification, a concerned parent heard about it and wrote the entire school board questioning the propriety of administering the test differently for select students. As you might have guessed from previous articles about the Hillsborough County School Board here at the Patch, a month later there has been no meaningful response from the school board other than Anna Brown, Project Director, Empowering Effective Teachers, saying:

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“I am responding to your email on behalf of all board members.  Thank you for sharing your concern with us.  Test security and adhering to standardized administration requirements are our priority.  Our assessment office will be assessing this situation immediately.  Please feel free to contact me directly with any further concern you may have.”

So often it seems that your representatives at the school board won’t do anything until they are forced by public outcry demanding action. Recent examples include the death of Isabella Herrera, the NAACP demand letter, and now testing irregularities.

It seems that the Hillsborough County School Board oftentimes won’t do anything until something like an article in the news forces their hand. Here, at the Juxtaposed News it’s our credo to meet this challenge. At this time we are investigating whether this special testing was unique to Plant City High School or typical at all of Hillsborough County’s high schools.

We will stay on this breaking news with more to come.

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