Galileo’s honor roll may be making a comeback after more than 6 years of discontinuation.
Newly appointed Principal Panjabi is planning to bring back the honor roll in an effort to celebrate student accomplishments and bring back a positive culture of recognition. He is aiming to acknowledge academic excellence and other commendable achievements among Galileo’s students. However, the process is still in the planning stages, with key details yet to be ironed out.
The problem Panjabi is still struggling with is deciding what criteria should be for the honor roll. He says, “Even if we were to use the criteria of say students getting a GPA of 3.75 or higher, we still get a large number of students so it wouldn’t be special, so we’re wondering if we should consider a higher bar like maybe someone who has a 3.8 or 3.9”.
Panjabi believes that the possible reasons that the honor roll had stopped in the first place was because of a period of time when there was a turnover of administrators, and nobody was willing to take up responsibility for the job. Another possible reason was that most of the names on the honor roll list are going to be Asian. “There’s nothing wrong with that but then it might appear that the school only celebrates Asian students and not African American students or Latino students, and it would be seen as unfair to do that,” Mr. Panjabi states.
On the other hand, Mr. Panjabi also said, “I mean I feel like because we don’t do enough to celebrate student achievements something is lost, all these students are putting in hard work and we don’t do enough to help them put it on their application to college. Say I earned the honor roll for the last three years or I was recognized by the principal for doing such good work, you know i think that carries weight so I understand the imbalance that it might create by maybe having only Asian names on the list but i have questioned whether we should stop the honor roll entirely because it seems unfair.”
The principal wants to be more inclusive and include other criteria as we get more used to the routine, like maybe someone who has shown the greatest improvement has had C’s and D’s for the semester and then they pushed their grades up to B’s an A’s. In terms of a GPA they may not have enough to qualify for an honor roll, but Panjabi believes that they should still recognize their improvement.
If the honor roll were to return, Panjabi plans to put up the list on the bulletin board next to room 206, with pictures of all of Galileo’s graduates. The list would be tracked, printed out, and put up on synergy for those who wish to see.
