BANGOR – Bangor High School freshmen who scored poorly on English-Language Arts and math assessments during the past year will have another opportunity this summer to demonstrate they’ve met the state’s academic standards.

From July 6 to 23 at the high school, students will be given new lessons and new assessments – called replacement tests – that measure their knowledge of two of the eight subjects that make up Maine’s Learning Results.

The results are important because in order to earn a high school diploma, all students in this year’s freshmen class in Bangor will have to score well enough on a series of tests over the next four years to prove they’ve acquired at least a basic understanding in each subject area.

Bangor students in the Class of 2007 will be among the first in the state to have to demonstrate mastery of the new Learning Results standards to get a diploma. All freshmen in the state this past year were initially supposed to meet the new diploma criteria, but too many schools needed more time to establish assessment systems, so a one-year delay was approved.

School officials in Bangor, however, decided to stick with the original date. The Maine Department of Education is not officially keeping track of how many high schools might be getting a jump-start on the diploma requirements, but state officials believe the number is quite small based on anecdotal information.

“We’ve been working on this a long time. We’re confident in the assessments,” said Robert Ervin, superintendent of schools in Bangor.

According to the state guidelines Bangor High School has adopted, assessments will be scored using a four-point scale. Scores of 1 stand for not meeting the standard, 2 for partially meeting the standard, 3 for meeting the standard and 4 for exceeding the standard.

Students will need to average a score of 3 or better on their assessments in each subject area through the four years of high school to be awarded a diploma.

The number of assessments per subject area will vary, but in English-Language Arts, for instance, Bangor High students will be required to take 16 assessments through four years.

Ervin stressed recently that students who didn’t score well enough on either the initial assessments or on replacement tests that were given during the past school year should participate in the summer program being offered.

This summer is the last chance for freshmen to replace the assessments they took this year. Once school begins in September and those students are sophomores they can’t go back and be retested on subjects from the previous year. There will be new assessments along the way that could get students to the total number of required points, but they’ll be based on new content and new material.

“It would be difficult on teachers and students” to backtrack, Assistant Superintendent Frank Hackett said. In the fall, “you’ve got students looking for a fresh start with a new set of classes. Having to think about trying to take replacements for assessments they took in the fall of their freshman year isn’t manageable.”

For teachers, “it’s enough of a burden to do replacements with students during the course of the year. It’s not an easy task to try to reteach students who don’t do well [on their Learning Results assessments] while at the same time maintaining the pace and rigor for the rest of the students,” he said.

Hackett emphasized that receiving a diploma based on the Learning Results depends on the total accumulation of test points at the end of a student’s senior year, not on any one year’s assessments. Even if a high school student didn’t pass the recommended number of assessments in any given year, he or she will continue on to the next grade, he said.

In addition to demonstrating they have met the standards in the Learning Results, Bangor students must pass a certain number of classes to amass enough credits to graduate – the traditional means of determining whether a diploma will be issued. Students who fail a class typically end up taking the class again to meet the credit requirement, Hackett said.

With the credit requirements and all the Learning Results tests that students will be required to take in other subject areas in subsequent years, Superintendent Ervin is concerned that freshmen who don’t take their replacement tests this summer will run out of time to meet their diploma requirements.

The situation becomes more precarious each year with the pressure being on those students to get the required points by graduation time, he said.

About 30 students are eligible for this summer’s English program. The high school is still determining how many students should participate in the math make-up program.

Learning Results replacement test programs will be offered each summer from now on. Next year freshman and sophomore make-up programs will be offered; the year after that, junior assessments will be added. The school system hasn’t decided whether to offer seniors the chance to retake assessments the summer after graduation.

“For the majority of students meeting the learning results isn’t going to be a problem,” said Hackett. “Because the assessments are integrated into the curriculum, it would be very difficult for students to do well in their classes and not also meet the Maine Learning Results requirements.”

The new Learning Results standards have not improved Bangor High School’s curriculum or made the program tougher, Hackett said.

“Our curriculum was already more rigorous than anything the Learning Results introduced. Our challenge was to figure out how the Learning Results requirements fit into our existing curriculum. The way we did it is a compliment to our program – that we could fit the Learning Results assessment system in the first two years is an indicator of how rich our curriculum is,” he said.