School Board subcommittee advances policy modification aimed at facilitating competency-based grading

MANCHESTER, N.H. – The Manchester School District has long sought to move toward a competency-based grading system for its students. One proposed policy change discussed at last week’s Manchester Board of School Committee Teaching and Learning Committee could help move the district one step closer toward that goal.

The proposed policy modification, known as Instruction 125, would update language providing greater latitude for district and school administrators to create procedures that facilitate their efforts to enforce grading systems based solely on academic performance.

In the change, issues not directly related to a student’s aptitude in a subject such as attendance or forgetting to put a name on a test could no longer be used to deduct from a student’s grade.

Another modification would allow work to submitted up to 10 days late without penalty, but not accepted after that point without a student-written proposal approved by the teacher to allow the assignment past that point.

Additionally, an equivalency chart comparing traditional letter grades with new competency-based grades will be replaced with separate charts for each school depending on if they use letter grades or competency-based grades. Currently, Manchester School of Technology is the only one of Manchester’s four public high schools that use a competency-based system.

The proposed changes would also provide a procedure for awarding credits to students who take classes at both Manchester School of Technology and the other high schools.

While students in letter-based grading systems can theoretically memorize and regurgitate answers and receive good grades even if they do not understand what those answers mean, competency-based systems are geared toward a student’s demonstration of understanding in a particular topic that is being graded. However, competency-based models are seen as far more complicated due to additional professional development needs for educators and scheduling hurdles as well as equity concerns coming from different students with different learning styles presenting potentially identical levels of competency in different forms from each other in the same topic.

At-Large Board of School Committee Member Peter Argeropoulos expressed concerns that even though the policy as currently written is seen as inadequate by many educators in the city, the changes did not provide a replacement framework that would actually improve the situation. Board of School Committee Student Representative Erika Barberi also questioned if not emphasizing the importance of those non-directly related aspects in learning could harm students in the long-run when those attributes may become essential in some real-world situations after graduation.

Ward 3 Board of School Committee Member and Committee Chair Karen Soule on the other hand saw the proposal as a necessary step forward to help the district eventually expand competency-based grading.

The proposed policy change was paired with two other related proposed policy changes

An amendment to the Students 101.1 policy would remove references to the no grade policy: a policy that automatically gave students a failing grade in a class after missing a certain number of instructional days. The policy was eliminated in 2023 and did not return after a brief re-examination in 2024.

The other amendment was to the Instruction 104.2 policy, which would be removed entirely from the district’s policies. That police required teachers to create “formative assessments” of student progress at regular intervals.

These proposals will likely go before the full Board of School Committee at their next meeting.

UPDATE: This policy was approved with a minor amendment at the March 10, 2025 Board of School Committee meeting.