Administration extended its no-pass policy another week, after its introduction at the beginning of second semester, according to assistant principal Kari Schwietering.

Schwietering said the policy idea, which originally was going to last for the first week of the semester, came about from talking to teachers.

“As we finished up first semester, a number of teachers had said (we should) start the semester saying that as a collective message from the school, it would be a good message to be able to send,” Schwietering said.

Schwietering said the policy’s aim is to promote student attendance to begin the semester.

“The main focus is the idea of being in class during class time is the best indicator to student success,” Schwietering said. “So if we make that as our collective message to start the semester that our hope is that will be a solid message for students to start the semester two.”

According to Schwietering, administration decided to extend the policy for another week due to events at the school and positive staff feedback.

“Our intent was to do it for the first week, just as kind of a reset to the second semester, and we extended it for this week,” Schwietering said. “Partly because there’s just a variety of things that are going on this week. So just with the number of things that are going on and good feedback that we have gotten from staff, that they felt that it was a good way to start the semester.”

Schwietering said the extension will also ease the process of finding students for tuberculosis testing.

“TB testing is happening this week and so that was also our hope to make sure that students are where they’re supposed to be that as we are going around to collect them, we weren’t but as that was happening, just making sure that students are where they’re needed to be,” Schwietering said.

Schwietering said the extension of the no-pass rule will continue through this week school-wide, but teachers can enforce it all year.

“At this point, I believe it will just be these first two weeks, but keeping in mind that classroom teachers can do it all year round if they want to,” Schwietering said. “And so ultimately they can absolutely do that as their own classroom policy.”