Forget It Jake, It's Baltimore

or Balmer, as the natives sometime call it. John Sexton at Hot Air, Baltimore: High School Student With 0.13 GPA Is Near The Top Half Of His Class

This week Fox 45 in Baltimore reported on a 17-year-old high school student who was just told that instead of graduating, he is being sent back to 9th grade. How is this possible? Well, it turns out the young man has only been to school about half the time and when he was there he failed almost every class he took:

His transcripts show he’s passed just three classes in four years, earning 2.5 credits, placing him in ninth grade…

As we dig deeper into her son’s records, we can see in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days. But in those three years, only one teacher requested a parent conference…

In his four years at Augusta Fells, France’s son earned a GPA of 0.13. He only passed three classes, but his transcripts show his class rank is 62 out of 120. This means, nearly half his classmates, 58 of them, have a 0.13 grade point average or lower.

So let’s just start with the school here. They knew this student wasn’t showing up for school and was failing nearly all his classes, yet they continued promoting him year after year. And only one teacher ever asked to talk to his family? And the same holds for at least half of the senior class. That explains the performance numbers at the school which Fox 45 published in a separate story. . .

Wanna bet that the three classes he passed were gym? Or the teacher just wasn't taking taking attendance and gave everybody a pass? At least in 2010, the teachers unions gave him an excuse.