Update: College Board reverses SAT cancellation that left Tri-City students scrambling
A canceled SAT college entrance exam is back on this weekend after an outcry from students and parents.
Kennewick School District staff confirmed Wednesday afternoon that the College Board will allow the Saturday, June 7, test to take place after the site coordinator at Kennewick High School canceled it this week due to a lack of proctors.
The 107 students will now be allowed to take the exam after Superintendent Traci Pierce, Principal Ron King and Assistant Principal Twila Wood secured individuals to help run the exam.
The high school will be the only testing site in the Tri-Cities approved to host the Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT, on Saturday, June 7 — the same day many local high schools are hosting graduation ceremonies.
On Tuesday, families of the students were notified the test would be canceled, and they later learned a makeup date was in the works. Families told the Tri-City Herald their students have spent months studying and thousands of dollars in material to prepare for the standardized exam. They’ve also scheduled vacations, scholarship deadlines and summer plans around the sacrosanct test day.
SAT seats are coveted. College Board, the corporation administering the exam, sets only a handful of dates throughout the year for the nation’s high schoolers to take the exam, and test centers must undergo an application process to host. Some U.S. students have reported traveling hundreds of miles, with stays in motels, just to take the exam.
The next test day is Aug. 23, but there are few seats left across the state of Washington and it’s too close to college admissions season, families say. Kristina McKennon, parent of a Richland High School junior, had enrolled her son for a test in Boise as a last-ditch effort.
At the same time, some colleges and universities have dropped the SAT as a mandate to be considered for admission in recent years, mostly due to the disruption caused by the COVID pandemic. Neither University of Washington nor Washington State University currently require the test.
Dlovan Schatlo, a Hanford High School parent, was one of a few who spoke out Wednesday about the testing snafu. They successfully demanded Kennewick High School and College Board restore the Saturday test.
She thought the email containing the cancellation was spam when it first hit her inbox. Her daughter, a junior, had invested weeks in libraries and with SAT test groups and spent hundreds of dollars on testing materials.
Studying by itself took a large “mental toll” on her daughter, she said, but the cancellation announcement just set her off.
“Our jaws dropped,” said Schatlo, who works as an attorney for a Washington nonprofit. “It’s like [the students are] losing momentum. She was devastated. She yelled at me when I told her.”
Schatlo said she had spent helpless hours on the phone with College Board, its representatives telling her to find another site and submit a complaint. A couple of the Tri-City students were transferred to a test in Walla Walla, but not her child.
Her daughter was unavailable to attend the makeup because she will be in Asia on vacation. Schatlo says her daughter wants to follow in her footsteps to become an attorney and is looking at international schools.
Schatlo worried the loss of opportunity the canceled test might have on impoverished students. The $68 registration fee is steep enough for many families, but rural students might also have to arrange for transportation and additional resources.
“We have been told by College Board that a cancellation this short is unheard of. They have told us that, had it been a month ago, these kids would have been able to test elsewhere in the nation. But, now, they are out of luck,” wrote McKennon, who enrolled her son in a $1,000 SAT prep course.
Pierce wrote in an email to parents that she found out early Wednesday morning that the College Board site coordinator at the school had canceled the test and she got to work quickly to remedy the situation.
They secured proctors for both the Saturday test day and makeup date, and submitted a formal request to the College Board to allow the June 7 test to resume. A response from the corporation was initially expected by Friday, but the school district confirmed the test was on later that day.
This story was originally published June 4, 2025 at 1:41 PM.
