Dear Editor:
Re: North Van Schools Ditching Honour Roll, Dec. 12 front-page story.
Many students in my West Vancouver Sentinel Secondary 2013 grad class received honours, including myself.
It was nice to get one, but so many students received honours that they were not very special among us. Maybe the standards were low or maybe we were a very smart grad class.
The real value was for university applications. We thought adding that on our application was worth something.
According to the North Vancouver School District representative in your article, they are not. So, I guess the benefit of honours was that they really pleased our grandparents.
There are already people blaming students for the school board’s decision to remove of the honour roll. Apparently, students are so dumb and lazy that they don’t want grades to have value. That is definitely not the case and students are not the ones who made the decisions on to remove honour rolls.
They’re comparing it to giving “participation awards.” They need to remember who gives kids participation trophies: the adults running the children’s sports leagues.
From the age of six, playing T-ball, it seemed like every kid already thought that participation awards were meaningless. We knew who won and who lost. Six-year-olds weren’t giving them to ourselves, and we did not value them.
If honour rolls have absolutely no effect on university applications, then keeping or removing them doesn’t really matter.
Also, don’t blame the students for the removal of the honour rolls. They did not make the decision to do so. Blame the school district.
Juan Manuel Placio
North Vancouver
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