I hear things from my sister and some friends about how things at Housy are going these days, and I have to say that I’m so glad I graduated when I did. Between student protests, NYPs, and a quasi-authoritarian administration that has actually banned students from saying Housy, it seems like a real shitshow these days. Yes, you read that right. The Region One administration has decided that students shouldn’t be using the word Housy to address our school because apparently students from other schools use it as an insult toward us. Newsflash, Region One: Housy sucks regardless of what you call it. We’ve been using Housy as a shortened version of our school’s ridiculously long name for years.

That isn’t the issue with Housy I want to discuss though. No, the issue we need to talk about is NYPs. Housy has implemented a new grading program that, quite frankly, is going to leave its students underprepared for the real world. When I was a student, athletic eligibility was based off of your overall class grade; if you had two Ds or one F as a class average, or a failing GPA, you weren’t eligible for sports. Under the new system, two NYPs takes you out of the running. Roughly half of our student athletes are at risk of losing eligibility due to two bad grades.

Not Yet Proficient grades, or NYPs, are being awarded this year is lieu of Ds and Fs. Students with NYPs can resubmit the assignment at any point until the end of the class. If a student has a single NYP grade at the end of the course, they have to take the entire course over. This is obviously wildly different from the grading practices of the past, and the grading practices used at colleges.

Let me give you an anecdote. I am horrifically bad at permutations, so I had a number of bad grades during this unit of Algebra 2. However, because I’m good at math overall, I still did well in the class despite that week’s worth of D-level grades. I didn’t repeat the class, and I shouldn’t have because I understood 99% of the material. Those few grades weren’t worth the blemish on my transcript, and the school recognized that.

(For full article click on link below, it is not a pay site so you will be able to finish the whole article)

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/pam-vogel-nyps-housy-falling-apart