Humble Independent School District students who reach the end of a grading period with a failing average will now receive grades reflecting their true scores, rather than a minimum mark of 50, thanks to a recent court ruling.

A Travis County judge upheld Texas’ minimum grade ban on June 28, denying a challenge to the 2009 law that had been levied by Humble ISD and a group of other Houston-area districts.

Though displeased with the law and the ruling, district officials say there are other tools to keep struggling students from falling behind and becoming at risk of dropping out.

“I personally still believe that that’s not a good decision, for students or for education, but nevertheless I am not the judge,” superintendent Guy Sconzo said at a board of trustees meeting last week, at which the board changed its grading policy to reflect the ruling.

Board president Keith Lapeze said after the meeting that Humble ISD does not plan to appeal. He said the risk of increased dropouts concerns him.

“There are two ways to deal with that issue,” Lapeze said. “The first is setting a minimum grade policy so no student will fall too far behind, where if they change their habits and start studying they can catch up. Another policy, which is on the books, is retesting, allowing a teacher to retest a student to allow that student to catch up.”

Lapeze said he hopes teachers will make more use of the retesting policy going forward.

Assistant superintendent for learning Janet Orth said re-teaching and retesting are common now, often at the teacher’s discretion. Orth added she expects the district to focus more on those tools as a result of the new policy.

The goal is student mastery, she said — precisely when the student masters the topic is secondary.

Still, Orth said she is concerned the ruling will leave some students unable to recover from a bad few weeks. Earning the previous minimum of 50 left a student plenty of ground to make up to reach 70, the passing score, she said.

“If you have a student that ends up with a grade of 30 or 25 … it’s almost mathematically impossible for them to bring that up to a 70,” Orth said. “Then students give up. They could become discipline problems. We do feel that it has the potential for impacting our dropout rate.”

Senate Bill 2033 easily passed both legislative chambers in May 2009, was signed by Gov. Rick Perry the next month and took effect last September. Some school districts left their policies untouched, however, arguing the bill did not explicitly ban minimum grades on midterm or semester-end grades.

When Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott sent districts a letter last fall clarifying how the law should be applied, it prompted the lawsuit filed in November by districts in Fort Bend, Aldine, Klein, Alief, Anahuac and Clear Creek. Humble, Deer Park, Eanes, Dickinson and Livingston joined later.

Judge Gisela Triana-Doyal ruled the language in the law explicitly applied to both individual classrooms assignments and to end-of-grading-period marks.