Shepherdstown Middle School students run around, during recess, on Tuesday afternoon. Jefferson County's schools started the 2023-2024 academic year on Monday. Tabitha Johnston

CHARLES TOWN — At its regular meeting on Monday evening, the Jefferson County Board of Education gave an update on contractor bids for the new Shepherdstown Elementary School building and voted on putting the semester exam policy out for public review.

The semester exam policy was based on advice the board received from the Semester Exam Advisory Committee, which was presented during the regular meeting on May 22. The group of teachers suggested getting rid of exam requirements in hopes of giving teachers the freedom to assess their students as needed.

Superintendent Chuck Bishop advised the board to change the last line in the policy. He believed it sounded like the county was saying it wouldn’t do exams at all. Instead, Bishop wanted to make it clear that they are giving the power to the teachers to decide for themselves.

Board member Donna Joy said she did not agree with the policy, because the real problem is how they organize and administer the exams. She explained that when she was a math teacher at Jefferson High School, all the math teachers worked together to create exams that covered all the topics students needed to learn.

When Joy moved to teach at Washington High School, she encouraged the teachers to do the same, as it keeps things organized, though she recognized some classes would not be conducive to semester exams.

“There are certain classes, such as dance, where the best thing to do for an exam would be to give a performance, not necessarily a written exam,” Joy said. “But classes like math and many science classes, it’s really important to test that students have mastered that information or skills because going to the next semester in math or the next year in math is dependent on learning the information from the previous semester.”

According to board member Laurie Ogden, the teachers did a lot of research, which found that exams aren’t always the best metric of learning.

Jennifer Nicholson, one of the teachers on the Senior Exam Advisory Committee, spoke through Zoom to clarify the committee’s main points. She said the committee believed it would help teachers who didn’t have enough time to create exams and that taking away exams will increase the amount of instructional time and reduce cognitive overload. The committee also believed it better reflected the current trends in higher education. The board voted to put the policy out for review, with Joy and Carmen Bratton voting against.

The board then discussed contractor bids for the new Shepherdstown Elementary School building. It received four bids and accepted the lowest bid from Dustin Construction, Inc. for $27,988,000. Dustin Construction, Inc. is located in Maryland. It also built Spring Mills High School in Berkeley County.