A committee of Eanes school district staff members, students and parents are studying the issue of class rank at Westlake High School.

WHS Principal Linda Rawlings said that the school’s strong academic program, coupled with high-achieving students, may cause some students with good grades to end up in the lower echelons of their graduating class ranking.

“Because of the caliber of the students and educational experience at Westlake, students in our third quarter may have a grade-point average of 90 or higher,” Rawlings said.

The committee is considering proposing changes to the school board regarding the way the district publishes class rank.

“Our purpose is to help more of our students gain acceptance into the universities they want to attend,” Rawlings said. “We started talking about class rank a few years ago. During my conversations with principals in our consortium of schools from around the nation, it became clear that Highland Park and Westlake were the only schools in that group that rank every single student in the class. At the same time, I was having conversations with teachers, students, and parents about the stress that students were feeling over class rank and the disadvantage they felt that the rank gave them in the college application process.”

By law, public schools in Texas have to assign a rank number to each student in the top 10 percent of their class, Rawlings said. There is no law requiring that Texas schools rank every student.

Many colleges and universities use class rank as a criterion to accept or deny students for admission if the school ranks the students, Rawlings said.

A discussion of the district’s class-rank policy will be held at the WHS Performing Arts Center Lecture Hall Feb. 2 at 6:30 p.m. The meeting is open to the public.