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Eagle Point high school leaders explain gradebook behavior, plan software reconfiguration for next year
Summary
High school administrators and teachers told the Eagle Point School District 9 board that Synergy’s current standards-weighting caused interim grades to appear misleading; the district plans an “alternate standards grading” setup and will implement the change next school year after teacher and middle-school input.
Heather Marinucci, principal of Eagle Point High School, and teachers told the Eagle Point School District 9 board during its April work session that the district’s gradebook (Synergy) was calculating student grades as it was configured, but the configuration made interim grades confusing to teachers and students.
"It's not broken. It's working the way that we designed it to work. But the interpretation of what the grade book was doing, that was the big question mark," Marinucci said, summarizing findings after teachers raised concerns. Robert Elliott, an economics and government teacher, presented examples showing how adding a new standard with process work but no performance assessment can temporarily inflate a student’s interim score and then drop it when a test is later entered.
Why it matters: Teachers said interim grade behavior sometimes surprised students and parents — for example, a student’s apparent A dropping after a test — which could obscure midterm interventions and confuse families. Elliott said he made a spreadsheet to reproduce Synergy’s calculations and used that tool to explain the math to students.
District staff described a technical fix and a rollout plan. Liliana Pineda, Synergy/IT support, said the vendor offered an “alternate standards grading” configuration that separates performance assessments and process work inside each standard, then rolls child standards up to a parent standard so weights apply once rather than multiply across multiple standards. In pilot tests the district used weights intended to total the familiar 70% performance / 30% process split (examples discussed used relative weightings such as 7/1.5/1.5 to approximate 70/30 when standards are weighted).
Administrators said the changes should preserve the ability to see where a student is struggling on a specific skill while avoiding misleading interim percentages. Marinucci said the district will not change historical grades: the configuration change would be implemented beginning with the 2025–26 school year so year‑to‑date grades remain comparable. The district team also said middle‑school teachers and instructional coaches must be included in final decisions about weights before the change is turned on.
Support and rollout: Staff said they are already testing the configuration with teachers. Marinucci and Elliott said teacher training will be required so instructors present consistent messages to families. Pineda and IT staff said the standards view and the detailed breakdown of how students perform on parts of each standard will remain available for interventions.
The discussion closed with board recognition of Elliott’s analysis and a plan to return with finalized weight choices and a timeline for teacher training before the start of next school year.
