This school year Loudoun County provided all Dominion students with personal chromebooks. As a result, most of the computer labs were turned into regular classrooms. This means that this year the students will be taking their SOLs on their chromebooks instead of moving to a computer lab for the testing, which drastically changes the SOL schedule.

Testing coordinator Mr. Chuba was in charge of creating the SOL schedule for this year and making sure the testing will be successful under this schedule. “We are going to conduct all the tests in a 8 day period,” Chuba said. He proposed the schedule to the department chairs and he believes that it will “cause the least amount of disruption of the students and their schedules.”

Starting Monday, May 20, “Everyone who has an SOL first period, will take their SOL. That’s approximately 21 classrooms testing all at once,” Chuba explained. Tuesday fifth block will take their SOLs, Wednesday second block will be in testing, Thursday – sixth, and so on until all of the blocks have taken their SOLs. Meanwhile, the students that do not have SOLs during those blocks, will remain in their classrooms for 3 hours and 10 minutes.

“We have always had the luxury of having the computer labs to space things out over a longer period of time,” said Mr. Chuba. “Now we are trying to do all the testing just in a 3 hour block.” This new testing schedule is new and, therefore, not guaranteed to be successful, but Mr. Chuba and the department chairs have high hopes for this change.

Mr. Chuba added, “This is going to be really unusual for the students, students have to come everyday with a fully charged chromebook.” Due to lack of spare chromebook chargers and power cords, students will have to be responsible and charge their own devices before the SOL testing.