Valedictorian honor returns to W. Chicago

It turns out that West Chicago Community High School's seniors will indeed have students who will be honored at the end of this year as valedictorians.

School board members on Tuesday voted to reinstate the honor three years after eliminating it for the class of 2008 and beyond.

In recent years, Community High has graduated anywhere from four to 12 valedictorians. Each one often receives a lengthy reading of their accomplishments at graduation.

The school board's new policy weeds out students with identical perfect grade-point averages by ranking those students by the number of credit hours achieved during the student's high school career.

"We can come up with a system that incorporates 1,800 variables (for selecting a valedictorian) but this is a nice, neat system," school board member Gordon Cole said.

Past school officials expressed concern the multiple valedictorian honors were adding hours to commencement ceremonies at the school.

In its place, school officials had planned to recognize students with perfect 4.0 grade-point averages at an honors night ceremony and with a brief notice at graduation.

But last month, board President Tony Reyes asked school board members to revisit the policy change as a reminder that this year's class will no longer have the designation.

The revised policy still allows for the possibility that multiple students could achieve identical weighted grade-point averages.

Superintendent Lee Rieck said the policy could be further amended to distinguish student ranks based on the number of activities they're involved in at the high school.

Rich Nagel was the only school board member to vote against Tuesday's policy change. He argued the provision would make some students only take classes or participate in activities solely to be recognized for the school's top academic honor.

"We might as well throw everybody's name into a hat and pick one student," he said of the change, "because that's the system we're going to end up with."