GUILDERLAND — Annette Landry wasn’t aware the Guilderland schools were in what she called a “huge paradigm shift” when she came to the school board last week.

She was upset that about 50 eighth-graders whose parents wanted them in honors English next year had to vie for just three spots through an essay contest. Landry’s daughter won a spot, but Landry wanted the board to be aware of the problem.

As part of a nationwide movement toward inclusion, Guilderland did away with core, or special education, classes this past fall. For ninth-grade English there are now just two types of classes: honors (to which students are admitted on the basis of a teacher’s recommendation) and Regents, for everyone else.

“I think parents choose to live in Guilderland because they expect a great school with academic rigor,” Landry said later.

“I don’t think parents realize that they’re going to get rid of honors classes and tell people that their kids can do independent work and earn an honors designation,” Landry continued.

High school Principal Thomas Lutsic said at the board meeting, “I think where we’re headed is you’re going to combine all three — core, Regents, and honors” [in the same classroom].

Assistant Superintendent for Instruction Demian Singleton told The Enterprise later, “That was just an idea. I don’t think there’s anything definitive about that.”

He said, both at the meeting and afterward, that Landry’s comments to the board had raised a question about honors classes that the board needed to consider in a more thoughtful and far-reaching way. “If you make honors a separate space, there will always be a maximum capacity, and  you will always run into this issue; there will always be someone who will not get in,” said Singleton.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a separate space, he said, and thinking about the issue is work that the board should start to do right away.

“There’s a lot of research out there that students, including the highest-achieving students, benefit from having a diverse classroom — not just culturally diverse, but also in terms of academic ability or standing,” Singleton said.

So would high-achieving students really benefit from discussing esoteric literary texts with kids who might rather be playing football, he was asked.

Singleton answered that it would depend on how a class was structured. He said that, for instance, maybe an optional honors symposium could be offered to complement work done in the classroom.

At the board meeting, Lutsic said that about 50 parents this year had requested an “override,” asking for their child to be admitted to ninth-grade honors English without a recommendation.

Was this large number of override requests a reaction to the new, more inclusive class structure? Were kids and parents fleeing the Regents classes that now spanned a wider range of abilities, afraid that they were not going to be challenging, Lutsic was asked later.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t say what is in parents’ minds.” He said that he did not yet “really know” the children in question (or their parents), since they were not yet in high school.

He said that 50 is a “not uncommon” number for override requests. “Sometimes it’s lower, and sometimes it’s higher.”

He added that administrators will soon begin to discuss the idea of “having all the kids together and giving the students in those classes opportunity to show that they have performed at an honors level and receive honors distinction.

“It would be up to each student,” Lutsic continued, “to individually demonstrate honors-level work.”

He plans, he said, to start to “hear from teacher voices, administrator voices, and I’d like to hear from student and parent voices as well.”

Currently, Lutsic said, the high school offers 12 sections of Regents English, and four sections of honors English, in the ninth grade.

It also offers aligned classes, team-taught by English and social studies teachers. So, for instance, Lutsic said, literature read in an aligned class might include more global literature by authors from South America or Asia, to correspond to the social studies curriculum. Aligned classes are an option that students can choose instead of Regents and in which, he said, students can do extra work to earn an honors designation.

Landry is assistant principal and athletic director at Berne-Knox-Westerlo Secondary School, but told The Enterprise that she is speaking on this issue strictly as a parent of a Guilderland student.

Landry noted at the board meeting that the 50 parents who had requested an override were asked to have their children stay after school on June 2 to complete a Regents essay test. On the basis of this test, they were told, three students would be chosen for placement into existing honors sections.

That day, she said, 20 kids showed up and wrote the essay.

Her daughter, Alyssa, was one of the three chosen for placement, she said later. But she went before the board not for Alyssa, she told The Enterprise, but to draw attention to the ongoing problem for the many other students and parents.

“Twenty kids being denied placement into an honors program — that sounds almost criminal to me,” remarked board member Barbara Fraterrigo at the meeting. “Why aren’t these kids being offered an honors class?”

“They were not recommended,” came Lutsic’s answer. Lutsic listed the criteria teachers look at in deciding who to recommend, which included work ethic, initiative, communication skills, creativity, ability to work independently, and perseverance.

“You need some sort of criteria,” he continued. You could just put everybody in who wants to be in, he said, but, in that case, “how do we guarantee that those [the most motivated students] are really the ones that are in there?”

Board member Barbara Fraterrigo told The Enterprise, “My dream would be that any child who wants to take an honors class would be able to.” She said it breaks her heart to think of the other 17 kids who wrote essays on June 2.

At the meeting, board member Catherine Barber noted that her son — whom she did not mention at the time is now a Columbia-educated journalist with Wired magazine — was not recommended for ninth-grade honors English. He got in on an override, she said.

Barber suggested later that it’s hard to get 13-year-olds interested enough to stay after school and write an essay, and that perhaps for those 20 students who demonstrated that level of interest, another section of ninth-grade honors English should be opened. She added, “I understand that there’s complexity in scheduling the classes.”

About the idea of having kids “earn” an honors designation through extra projects, Barber said at the meeting, “Sometimes students who are underchallenged, instead of working really hard, they withdraw and disengage.”

“How can a teacher’s recommendation carry so much weight that it directs the path that a student’s education takes throughout high school?” Landry asked rhetorically in a conversation with The Enterprise.

Landry suggested that recommendations, which she said are “subjective,” should be balanced with some kind of “objective data.”

Fraterrigo said much the same thing to The Enterprise, noting that Landry’s daughter had, according to Landry, had a 100 average in social studies during the first two quarters of the 2015-16 academic year, and a 98 during the first two quarters in English, but had still not been recommended.

Alyssa Landry had also, board members heard, been listed on the district’s website as one of a handful of Guilderland students who had taken the national Spanish exam, and she had participated in a Johns Hopkins enrichment program involving advanced English and math that allows students to sit, as seventh-graders, for college entrance exams.

At the meeting, board member Christopher McManus had said of Alyssa Landry, after hearing about some of her accomplishments, “If that’s not an honors student, what is?”

At the meeting, Lutsic said, “We have a fundamental philosophical question to answer: Do we want to make another section? It’s not hard to do from a technical perspective. It’s hard to do from a philosophical standpoint.”

At issue is the mix of student classrooms. As principal Lutsic noted, taking a large number of highly motivated students out of the Regents classrooms would “tilt the balance.”

Singleton said at the meeting, “As long as we define honors as being a separate box, we will always  run into a time when the box is full. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a space. If we look at it differently, maybe we can allow students to earn that honors on their transcript.”

Singleton told The Enterprise that he expected that a team of stakeholders would begin to look into the question of what to do about honors.

About the future of honors classes, Superintendent Marie Wiles told The Enterprise, “This summer our middle- and high-school teachers will work together and begin to map out that conversation. We’ll include guidance counselors as available. We’ll also include faculty at the start of the school year. Then we can be clear when we talk to parents.”

If any substantial change were to be made, Wiles said, “I think we would involve parents over the course of next year.”

First-term board member Seema Rivera said about the idea of doing away with honors as a separate class, “It’s not just doing the extra work, it’s the whole environment of the class, and you would lose that.”

For now, three students, including Alyssa Landry, will join ninth-grade honors English, on the basis of the essays they wrote on June 2. Seventeen others — as well as 30 others who did not write an essay that day — will need to try to prove themselves through extra projects if they hope to earn an honors designation on their transcript for ninth-grade English.

“I went to pick up Alyssa that day, and I saw the kids coming out of that room,” Landry said. “I know how bright her peers are.