By Melissa Rosequist
Twitter: @mrosequist_

While high school can be stressful enough as it is, students preparing for college are now enduring highly unusual circumstances as they navigate through online school hoping to still finish the year successfully.

In response to the difficult situation, Arcadia High School student Krista Morrell has started a petition seeking to get Arizona students’ grades changed to a pass/fail model.

Miss Morrell’s Change.org petition, addressed to Gov. Doug Ducey, has more than 200 signatures in 48 hours.

“My friends and I are having trouble keeping up with the new systems of online learning. We have all we need, laptops, resources and parent help, but I started thinking about kids not as fortunate as us, and how they don’t have the resources that we have,” Miss Morrell said of her decision to start the petition.

“There’s just so many different situations that it’s hard to keep focused on school work with everything going on. Having a pass/fail model would help with a lot of what’s going on because it’s crazy, what’s going on. School is a big stresser, especially to add onto a lot of the other stress going on.”

Miss Morrell’s petition describes the COVID-19 pandemic as “perhaps the most disruptive event in modern education history.”

“We are living it. Our current school system is designed for in-person teaching and interaction,” she said. “The quality of academics and learning is certain to suffer as ‘distance learning,’ implemented overnight, as brought challenges for administrators, teachers and students.”

At Arcadia, Miss Morrell says students are still being graded on their school work like normal --- but she points out other schools are not weighting the online grades as heavily.

“Just to make everything fair and universal, it would be best to do the pass/fail so no one gets an unfair advantage,” she said of receiving full credit for the 2019-20 school year.

One of the hardest situations the students are facing is the lack of access to their educators, Miss Morrell said.

“It’s just hard because we don’t have the same access to teachers. They have office hours for an hour, but it’s hard because they can’t teach us the material,” she said. “And some people learn differently. It’s hard to ask questions if you’re confused. It’s a hard way of life for teenagers. I know from what I’ve heard, a lot of people are not doing well.”

Some of the issues Miss Morrell lays out in her petition include:

• Rampant confusion
• Trying against the odds to keep a class schedule
• Nearly unbearable stress levels
• Difficulty keeping up with the semester’s teaching curriculum
• A significant decrease in teacher and counselor access
• Family issues
• Other commitments demanding time from the students
• Not having the resources needed for online learning

“We still want to learn, we just want to ask for help and a break during this time,” she said.

Overall, Miss Morrell says the pass/fail model would minimize the impact of high school students’ hopes and ambitions as they look toward the next phase of life.

In her petition, Miss Morrell states:

“We appreciate how hard our teachers are trying to deliver online education. We are all learning to work together in a new way. This week take time – a ‘learning curve’ as some say. In the meantime, the new approach is causing major inconsistencies in education delivery and learning. Given the unique circumstances, it is a virtual reality that our second-semester grades can be greatly affected.”

While the petition is addressed to Gov. Ducey, she says she merely hopes to get his attention. Miss Morrell has received a response from Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, who said this is an issue to be decided at the local level.

“I think she definitely does have the power and influence to change the petition. I hope that if she sees that my petition has a lot of support then I think maybe it will change her mind and she will help,” she said.

“I’m not trying to tell someone what to do, it’s just a suggestion and we want to be a part of the decision. This can change someone’s life, their college career, if someone’s family member has the virus. I feel like this would help a lot of people.”

Go to change.org.