By Stephanie Kane
Carrboro Commons Writer

Carrboro High School is in the initial stages of developing the Carrboro High School Academic Integrity Committee (AIC), which will be composed of faculty, students and parents who are concerned with promoting honor at Carrboro High.

Marc Millard, a Carrboro High science teacher, is primarily responsible for the organization of the Academic Honor Committee.
Staff photo by Stephanie Kane

The creation of the committee comes in response to the discovery of an elaborate cheating scheme at Chapel Hill High School this February.

Carrboro High Principal Jeff Thomas said the incident at Chapel Hill High has “put the microscope on our whole school district. We have a high performing school district and high schools from which many students are accepted into Ivy Leagues, so the media attention has been heavy. But I think some good can come of this, and we can learn and grow from a negative situation.”

The Carrboro High AIC will be modeled after the East Chapel Hill High School AIC, which has been in operation for several years and is firmly established in the school’s system.

Marc Millard, a Carrboro High chemistry teacher who previously taught at East Chapel Hill High, is organizing the committee and says the AIC will be up and running for the 2008-2009 school year.

Millard plans to have at least one faculty member from each department present at AIC meetings and is currently gathering teacher recommendations for students who “embody personal integrity and honor.” These students will be extended an offer to join Student Academic Integrity and Leadership (SAIL) next year.

Millard also hopes to have parents in attendance who can voice valuable input and serve as a support unit for faculty, but they will have more limited involvement when confidentiality is at risk.

Eleventh grade English teacher Jan Gottschalk hopes SAIL students will act as peer mentors who offer “positive reinforcement about the importance of being responsible for one’s own work and not replicating the work of others.”

“I’ve learned I must be more vigilant than I ever thought,” Gottschalk said about some of the preemptive measures she takes to prevent cheating.

Some examples of what she calls the “unfortunate need to patrol” include moving desks and students around the room, ensuring backpacks are appropriately put away and scrambling questions on tests. Gottschalk also makes sure students are aware that their papers will be put through a digital assessment and plagiarism detection Web site called TurnItIn.com.

In a recent survey printed in JagWire, the Carrboro High student newspaper, 75 percent of 141 students polled admitted to academic cheating.

Carrboro High junior Emile Toscano said, “I think [the AIC] is a good idea. Cheating isn’t that bad here, but it definitely happens.”

Gottschalk also said that she thinks it is important for the AIC and the school as a whole to define what cheating is in very specific terms. The AIC at East Chapel Hill High has determined that cheating includes such acts as copying homework, plagiarizing a paper and failing to show up in class to avoid taking a test.

As part of the efforts to educate students about academic honor, Millard said SAIL students will be responsible for constructing and hanging placards throughout the school that promote and define honor, as well as guiding their peers about how to deal with the pressures of high school academics.

This summer, Principal Thomas plans to revise the Carrboro High Student Handbook with a heavier focus on academic integrity and formally address these issues.

“We want to have our students really being ambassadors and examples of what to do and not do so we don’t have to face an issue quite this big,” Thomas said.