Livingston Academy tracking some of the most positive credit recovery trends the system has ever seen.
Counselor Melissa Trent said the credit recovery is offered to students with a 50 or above in a course.
“If a student fails something between 50 and 59 they do not have to sit through a whole class for that again they’ve understood at least 50 percent of the content and they can take a computer-based program,” Trent said. “But if a student falls below 50, then they need to retake the course because they’re missing content.”
Director of Schools Donnie Holman said there are three options for students to earn credit recovery, including after schools work, summer school, and Duel Enrollment Credit Recovery (DECR). She said DECR (pronounced decker) allows students to visit the DECR lab at the high school and do coursework there.
Trent said she attributes the current positive trends to students getting back to normalcy after the pandemic as well as increased communication with parents.
“I think that anytime we come back from the pandemic, I believe we are coming back from a little more relaxed environment so maybe students had that same mentality so they were happy to be back socially but maybe not expecting that rigor,” Trent said.
Trent said to calculate the credit recovery numbers each semester, she averages the number of students who are failing and considered credit recovery eligible regardless of the course. She said as of the end of the fall semester, about 16 percent of LA students fall into that category.
Trent said they expect that number to only improve before the end of the school year.
“We don’t want any of our students to fail by any means, we want them to succeed,” Holman said. “But if they do fail, that’s why we have this program in place so they can recover those credits.”