A frightening report out of the city of Baltimore’s schools finds that in one high school so many students are failing that one of its top students has only passed three classes in four years of attending school.
The mother of a student at west Baltimore’s Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts recently told Baltimore’s WBFF that her son will not be graduating this year despite attending the school for four years. And she wants to know why this has happened.
A major problem students face is the rising crime in Baltimore. Like the rising crime in so many other Democrat-controlled cities, Baltimore’s crime rate continues to spin out of control. In 2019, for instance, Baltimore suffered its highest murder rate since 1993.
Crime is so rampant that even TV shows have been forced to shut down filming because conditions became too dangerous for crew members.
The report on the Augusta Fells Savage student noted that Tiffany France’s 17-year-old son only passed three classes in four years and had a 0.13 grade point average. That isn’t enough to graduate, and the student will end up back in 9th grade starting next school year, France said.
But France said that it is the school that failed, not her son.
“He’s stressed and I am too. I told him I’m probably going to start crying. I don’t know what to do for him,” France told Project Baltimore, WBFF reported. “Why would he do three more years in school? He didn’t fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that’s the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn’t deserve that.”
The student’s transcripts showed that he failed both Spanish I and Algebra I, but was passed on to Spanish and Algebra II, anyway. He also failed English II, but was sent on to English III despite failing the precursor.
France said that this is intolerable.
Should there be an investigation into the failure of Baltimore Public Schools?
“I’m just assuming that if you are passing, that you have the proper things to go to the next grade and the right grades, you have the right credits,” France said.
Records also showed that even though the boy failed a whopping 22 classes during his first three years at the school, only one teacher scheduled a parent-teacher meeting. And France stated that no one at the school contacted her to tell her the boy was failing so badly.
France said that the school’s disinterest meant the boy wasn’t really given a chance.
“I feel like they never gave my son an opportunity, like if there was an issue with him, not advancing or not progressing, that they should have contacted me first, three years ago,” she said.
The report also found that even with the dismal 0.13 GPA, the student is ranked number 62 out of a class of 120. That means nearly half the class has passed even fewer than three classes in four years.
“He feels embarrassed, he feels like a failure,” France added. “I’m like, you can’t feel like that. And you have to be strong and you got to keep fighting. Life is about fighting. Things happen, but you got to keep fighting. And he’s willing, he’s trying, but who would he turn to when the people that’s supposed to help him is not? Who do he turn to?”
The Baltimore School District did not really have a satisfactory explanation for why France’s son was so ill-served by the district when WBFF asked for a comment.
But one administrator did respond to WBFF’s questions and said, “I get angry. There’s nothing but frustration. We see on the news the crime that occurs, the murders, the shootings, we know that there are high levels of poverty in Baltimore. Things like this are adding to that. His transcript is not unusual to me. I’ve seen many transcripts, many report cards, like this particular student.”
The administrator is right as far as it goes. The city is unsafe. This year, it was reported that Baltimore has a worse murder rate than El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, three countries that have been rife with gang activity, conflict, political strife and war. So, kids are dealing with a lot of things they should not have to be facing in this city that has been controlled by Democrats since 1967, when the last Republican mayor, Theodore McKeldin, left office.
Regardless, this problem is nothing new. Last year, WBFF reported that graduation rates at the Baltimore schools had fallen to a six-year low, as less than 70 percent of students earned a high school diploma.
The story seems to show that this whole situation is a tragedy for Baltimore’s children who are being completely failed by their politicians and educrats. Not only are the schools not educating these kids, the whole political establishment can’t even keep them safe long enough for them to even try to succeed in their schools.
Sadly, the statistics show that Baltimore’s children are being set up to fail from the start.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.