Virginia education board approves new rules for local student assessments

RICHMOND — The Virginia Board of Education has approved updated guidelines for Local Alternative Assessments, giving school divisions clearer rules for measuring student learning in courses that do not carry statewide Standards of Learning tests — and reigniting a familiar fight over timing, staffing costs, and how much flexibility local schools really have.

Local Alternative Assessments, or LAAs, are meant to let students show mastery through work that rewards critical thinking rather than rote memorization. Education leaders have told Virginia Mercury that the tools need basic statewide standards so quality and administration do not vary wildly from division to division. The board’s Sept. 24 business meeting finalized guidelines that Superintendent of Public Instruction Jenna Conway described as support for divisions trying to “understand how to do this well.”

The action follows last year’s legislative overhaul of Virginia’s testing system, which changed how SOL exams are administered and used to define what students should know at the end of each grade or course. Lawmakers directed the Board of Education to refresh LAA guidelines after redefining and categorizing assessments as mandatory or permissive, expanding permissive LAAs into new subjects, and spelling out content, scoring, and administration requirements. They also told the board to give every school board best practices for grading and scoring mandatory and permissive LAAs by Sept. 1 so local boards could adopt implementation policies.

Board members kept new scoring and reporting requirements while trying to leave room for divisions already midstream — a compromise between statewide consistency and the messy reality of a school year already underway. Third-grade science and history remain among courses with mandatory LAAs. Newly listed permissive LAAs include Virginia Studies, Civics and Economics, and end-of-course Earth Science and Chemistry.

Support at the meeting came with caveats. Sofhia Pineda, government relations specialist for the Virginia School Boards Association, welcomed broader flexibility to use local alternative assessments but urged the board and the Department of Education to deliver “clear guidance, sufficient professional development, implementation support, and resources,” citing staffing and budget impacts.

Neeley Minton, president of the Virginia Social Studies Leaders Consortium, said her colleagues likewise support the direction but worry about timing. Two requirements — double-scoring at least 15 percent of student responses and additional public reporting — arrived after many divisions had already started the year under an earlier draft. Minton said roughly 63 of Virginia’s 132 school divisions use LAAs, with sharp differences in staff capacity. In her own division, she said, about $12,000 is spent to ensure no teacher of record scores their own students’ work. Adding more scoring rounds or time, she warned, would raise costs “exponentially.”

Minton still called LAAs worth the investment because they are rigorous and relevant for students, but she asked the board to delay the new scoring and public-reporting rules until next school year. The board declined to wait, instead pressing staff to communicate clearly with divisions as the guidelines roll out.

The Department of Education said it will distribute the approved guidelines through newsletters, offer office hours and training from subject-area teams, gather feedback in regional meetings, review division assessment plans, and audit divisions that use LAAs. That compliance-and-support package will determine whether the Sept. 24 vote feels like help or an unfunded mandate in smaller rural systems that lack scoring teams and curriculum specialists.

For parents, the policy shift is less about acronyms and more about what appears in a child’s gradebook in subjects without a traditional SOL. Mandatory LAAs in early science and history, plus permissive options in civics-heavy courses, could mean more project-style and performance tasks — and more variation between neighboring counties unless the new guidelines bite. For teachers, double-scoring rules and public reporting raise workload questions that local school boards will have to answer with real dollars.

Virginia has spent years arguing about whether standardized testing crowds out deeper learning. LAAs were sold as a middle path: local design with state guardrails. The board’s latest guidelines try to harden those guardrails without freezing divisions that already built this year’s plans. Whether that balance holds will show up in spring audits, regional training attendance, and the next round of school-board budget talks when double-scoring invoices come due.

Email the Richmond School Board:
Matthew Percival, mpercival@rvaschools.net,
Kathryn Ricard, kricard@rvaschools.net,
Ali Faruk, afaruk@rvaschools.net,
Wesley Hedgepeth, whedgepeth@rvaschools.net,
Stephanie Rizzi, srizzi@rvaschools.net,
Anne Holton, aholton@rvaschools.net,
Cheryl Burke, cburke2@rvaschools.net,
Emmett Jafari, ejafari@rvaschools.net,
Shavonda Fernandez, sdixon@rvaschools.net,

Richmond is an independent city in the Richmond region.