Refusing to take the PARCC apparently became a fast-growing, late-breaking trend.

As reported in The Smoke Signal, about 80 students had filled out the form to refuse to take the PARCC as of last Thursday, according to PV Principal Tom DeMaio. After Monday’s paperwork deadline, according to DeMaio, a total of about 270 students — or over 20 percent — total refused to take the test and sat in the auditorium, cafeteria or their assigned classrooms for the testing, which ran Tuesday through Thursday.

Because so many students were not taking the test, administration decided to move the sophomore and junior refusers to the auditorium. Since only 25 to 30 freshman students refused, according to DeMaio, they remained in testing sites, as originally planned.

“There were 170 juniors who refused,” said DeMaio. “We didn’t feel it was a good testing environment to have 10 kids taking a test and 10 kids not taking a test in the same room. For those who were taking the assessment, we felt it would be less distracting if those kids were just not in the testing sites.”

Those who refused to test and did not show up during the testing periods were marked absent, but because students at Pascack Valley are marked based on a period-by-period basis, students were marked absent for reporting purposes only and it did not affect the attendance of any classes.

There were glitches in a few classes for the first half hour, but overall the testing went smoothly, according to DeMaio. There were few disturbances in the auditorium.

“On the first day, they were in there for three and a half hours so during the last 15 or 20 minutes kids were getting antsy,” DeMaio said. “A couple of kids were playing with the lights but that was the extent of it.”

DeMaio does not yet know whether or not parents will have to option to refuse the test in May, nor does he know how the test will progress next year. Because PARCC testing is so spread out across the state, it is not clear when results will be released.

The state had previously said that 95 percent of any school must take the test or the school would lose federal funding. With more than 20 percent of the school refusing to test, it is unclear whether or not the state will follow through with this, DeMaio said. The Commissioner of Education, David P. Hespe, spoke in front of the educational committee at the state senate on March 12 to discuss any possible changes to this policy. They also discussed two bills that will affect the PARCC in the future.

“I don’t think [The PARCC is] going away, but I think it has taken up a lot of resources and a lot of time,” DeMaio said. “I know that it’s definitely taking away from classroom instruction, which is a shame.

“I wanna give [students who took the test] a lot of credit because I saw a lot of kids who did take it seriously.”