QUINCY, Ill. – The Quincy school board wants parents to understand it’s in charge of their children’s education, not them.

The board’s attorney, Dennis Gorman, made that clear at a school board meeting Wednesday where he clarified the district’s rules regarding social promotion. Previously, district officials required parents to sign off if their child didn’t make the grade, but Gorman told attendees it’s ultimately the district’s call, the Herald-Whig reports.

“It’s not the parents’ call as to whether a child is retained,” Gorman said. “At the end of the day, it’s the responsibility of the Board of Education to decide if, in fact, students will be retained.”

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Gorman’s legal opinion is in response to a request by board president Stephanie Erwin, who learned during a district curriculum meeting that parents are asked to approve administrators’ decision to hold back a failing student. Children of parents who refused were promoted to the next grade in the past.

Gorman told board members that students must meet the standards set by board because social promotion is illegal in Illinois.

“If they do not meet the standards,” he said. “The law is clear. They are to be retained.”

Erwin told WGEM the district has a “No Social Promotion” policy, but it hasn’t been enforced in the past. Officials only began imposing the policy this year.

“Whether they’ve been ready or not we’ve been moving them onto the next grade, and that’s not benefiting anyone,” Erwin said. “It’s not benefitting the child, himself or herself, it’s not benefiting the class or the teacher they’re moving onto because they’re not ready,” Erwin told the news site.

Erwin even went out of her way at the recent meeting to make sure parents understand they’re not the ones in charge.

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“We have a policy that social promotion is not ok,” Erwin said, according to the Quincy Journal.

“We do and can hold children back if they have not met academic standards to move on. Last year we gave parents to courtesy of signing off on the decision to retain, but it is in the end a decision by the administrators and the teaching team, so even if parents do not want it, if we believe a child should be retained, the child will be retained,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that was stated firmly and clearly tonight.”

The clarification in Quincy comes as lawmakers in Florida haggle over student testing, particularly a key test third graders must currently pass to move on to fourth grade.

That test is designed to fight social promotion, but it could be scrapped as part of legislation aimed at rolling back standardized testing in the Sunshine State. Florida lawmakers added an amendment to Senate Bill 616 in a Senate Appropriations Committee Wednesday that would remove the test and others until the state’s online testing platform works properly, FlaglerLive.com reports.

Earlier this month, students and teachers were met with slow log-in times and other technical problems when they went to take the new fully online Florida Standards Assessments. Hackers also wreaked havoc on the system with a cyber attack.

Under the amendment, which would still need to gain approval by the full Senate and the House, “You can promote them, if you want to promote them, but you need to demonstrate why you’re promoting them,” Senate Education PreK-12 Committee Chairman John Legg, according to FlaglerLive.