For the 1st time Honors Pre-Calculus has been approved by the school board, allowing students in the class a 0.5 grade boost.

According to Pre-Calculus teacher Bill Doherty, the class has met the criteria for honors status for years. “So, the course is still basically the same course,” said Doherty. “We just changed the title to honors because the work that students have always been doing in Pre-Calculus always qualified for honors credit, so they just made the decision to grant honors credit for it.”

Pre-Calculus student senior Lilly Smith said, “I was in the right spot at the right time” to receive honors credit.

Students enrolled in the course previously cited some frustration that their participation would not qualify for the same credit. Senior Marcus Longton took Pre-Calculus last year, prior to the school board’s decision. According to Longton, “if the work is the same, [past students] should be given credit for what’s done in that class.”

Doherty agreed that “if students are doing honors work they should be getting honors credit.”

“I think the students before were kind of cheated out of a GPA bump,” agreed Smith.

“I feel like if that happened to me I would definitely feel a little frustrated because it is definitely a difficult class, and Mr. Doherty is a good teacher, but some of the concepts are a little hard to understand,” Smith added.

Freshman Brian Thomas recognized that “eventually there is going to have to be a change and there’s no other real way of doing it. It’s just going to have to go from 1 thing or another.”

Doherty said, “I think my current students are quite happy to get honors credit for the same work that their older brothers and sisters did.”