Last year, Cortez Middle School teachers recommended that 70 students repeat the grade that they were in, but 69 of them advanced to the next level anyway.

These students received what is commonly called "social promotion," where students are passed on to the next grade with their parents’ approval, despite recommendations from administrators and teachers and the fact that those students have not met the criteria to move on.

"Social promotion brings out a lot of emotions in a lot of people," said Mark Rappe, Montezuma-Cortez High School principal. "People will say that a student is too big or too old for the middle school — but they are reading at a third grade level."

Byron Wiehe, Cortez Middle School principal, said that any middle school student with three or more Fs has the potential to be retained.

"A letter will go out to the failing student’s parents early in the term stating that ‘because of current grades, your son/daughter is in danger of retention,’" said Wiehe. "At the end of the term we ask for recommendations from teachers and then from teams of teachers, counselors and a principal to discuss options."

Those options might include summer school, retention, or an alternative learning situation, said Wiehe.

Ideally, if a school had 70 students that needed to be retained, all 70 of those students would stay back, said Wiehe.

There are a number of variables that must be considered before a student is retained, however. "An age gap of 11-year-olds to 16-year-olds at the middle school can be a big social problem," Wiehe said. "Also, do we feel that if we keep a student back they can progress?"

If retention still seems to be the best solution, then an individual meeting is set up between administrators and the student’s parents. "If the parents still want their kid to move on then they sign a waiver asking for social promotion," Wiehe said. "This releases us from liability and makes the parents understand that their student will be moving on without having met the school’s standards."

School officials say that social promotion moves the problem from one school to the other without ever trying to solve it.

"Parents and students have been able to manipulate the system, and the schools have taken the rap," said Wiehe.

"A lot of kids are coming to the high school with poor test scores and poor skills," said Rappe, "I am the one who has to answer why kids aren’t graduating, though."

Rappe said that while many students did attend the summer school program, they thought of it as a penalty and were unmotivated.

Since then, the high school has reconfigured two of its English classes in order to bring the below-average reading students back up to speed.

"The English teachers at the high school are not supposed to be teaching reading," say Rappe. "They are running a regular English class, assuming that the kids are coming in right on track."

Re-1 School Board President Steve Hinton said that retaining students early on in their school careers could be the answer to getting kids on track.

"I think that we would be doing the student a favor by retaining them early on in order to get them at the proper learning level," Hinton said. "Otherwise the students lose encouragement and confidence and they start to get discouraged."

On March 6, New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson signed a bill that will allow parents to request only once that their failing kids be moved to the next grade. Following that, students will be forced to remain in the same grade until reaching the schools acceptable level for advancement.

In the Re-1 district, retention is mostly confined to the primary grades and performed only once if possible, said superintendent Bill Thompson.

"The problem is that kids who remain in the same grade at one of the rural schools will have the same teacher over again, and we like to shift them to a new teacher," said Thompson.

Thompson said that in the past, conversations with the school board have centered on revising some of Re-1’s policies on social promotion, and he said the topic will be revisited during an April 4 administration meeting.

But Hinton said that he thinks such legislation will not change the minds of parents who wish to move their children through the school system.