Editor’s note: The Auburn Reporter misinterpreted the acronym, PLC, in Gene Geiss’ April 20 letter to the editor. PLC stands for Professional Learning Communities. The following is the corrected letter.

I have walked through Auburn High School many times in the past few years and do not understand why the building needs to be replaced. It is warm, dry and very functional.

Student performance is going down at Auburn High School, and it has nothing to do with the building.

Would fewer classroom hours for students improve their performance? That is exactly what the Auburn School District did by making most Mondays a PLC (Professional Learning Communities) day, which has all the students miss one hour of instruction on those days (about four days per school year).

There is now talk of the Auburn School District doing away with letter grades and replacing them with “power standards,” which is another way to obscure low performance. This grading system punishes high-performing students and does a disservice to those students planning to attend a four-year college.

Maybe instead of running focus groups on how to squeeze out another few hundred votes to replace the Auburn High School building, the Auburn School District should be running focus groups on how to improve student performance.

– Gene Geiss