Being held back a year helped improve the performance of several Ann Arbor middle school students, Superintendent Todd Roberts told a school board committee tonight.

“Overall, the students were better than the first year in grades,” Roberts said. “Generally speaking, they did better.”

Nineteen middle school students were held back at the end of the 2007-08 school year, the majority at Scarlett Middle School. Then-Principal Ben Edmondson made the decision, which he called a “last-ditch” effort to save failing students.

The school board’s performance committee received the data during a discussion of retention and promotion policies in the district.

At the high school level, students move grades as they accumulate credits.

District administrators are currently working on a policy concerning when students would be retained at the middle school level. There currently isn’t such a policy. Administrators are expected to present a policy to the board’s performance committee in the coming weeks.

The board passed a policy for the elementary schools last year, but will likely tweak it this year.

Lee Ann Dickinson-Kelley, the district’s administrator for elementary education, told the committee that last year, the district retained five special education students; seven students, most from other countries who joined the district in the last month of school; and six students, four of whom were in kindergarten and had serious health issues that caused them to miss significant time.

She said the district also had requests from six parents to have their children - five at the kindergarten level and one in fifth grade - held back despite the schools' recommendation to move them up.

Dickinson-Kelley said the district needs to set up an appeals process. She said administrators hadn’t included a formal appeals process in the original policy.

“The goal is problem solving,” Roberts said. “We work together to find out what’s best for the students that all agree on, (but) there has to be some ultimate (decision) point.”

Board members were interested in hearing more about the students in middle school who were left back. They encouraged Roberts to have district staff set up a study tracking them toward graduation as compared to students with similar grades that didn’t get held back.

David Jesse covers K-12 education for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at 734-623-2534 or at davidjesse@annarbor.com.