School board approves new graduation requirements for Poudre School District
The Poudre School District Board of Education approved new high school graduation requirements Tuesday night.
The requirements, discussed at length during two previous meetings and revised based on feedback from the community and teaching staff, were placed on the consent agenda for the school board’s regular meeting and approved by a unanimous 6-0 vote with no additional discussion. Board member Carolyn Reed was absent.
Beginning with the graduating class of 2029, students will have more flexibility in how they earn the 240 credits required to earn a high school diploma through PSD. Each course in the four-block-day schedule used by PSD’s traditional high schools is worth five credit hours per quarter.
What's changing in Poudre School District's graduation requirements?
Students will no longer be required to complete 10 credits of world language or culture or five credit hours apiece of humanities and economics. In addition, the number of credits required for health and wellness is being reduced from 15 hours to 10.
Other changes are the addition of 10 hours of world history to comply with a mandate from the state legislature that all public schools in Colorado provide instruction in genocide and the Holocaust in a class required for high school graduation. That will be part of the required 30 credits in social studies — up from 25 previously — that also includes a required 10 credits in U.S. history and five in civics.
No change is being made to the existing requirements of 40 credits of language arts, 30 apiece of mathematics and science, 10 in fine and applied arts, and five in financial literacy.
The changes give students an additional 20 credits of flexibility — from 65 to 85 — in selecting electives to meet the 240 needed for graduation. They also allow students with disabilities on individualized education plans to earn an actual diploma rather than a certificate if they fulfill the requirements, including successful completion of a state-approved assessment.
Multilingual learners will also have a clearer pathway toward earning a diploma by allowing English language development courses to count toward their language arts or as electives. And immigrant students who enroll in PSD without a formal transcript will have access to a process that awards them credit for demonstrated knowledge from classes they took in their home countries, rather than starting with zero credits, as they do under the current system, Assistant Superintendent Julie Chaplain said.
Some share concerns about health education changes
Public comment prior to Tuesday night’s vote included three people who shared concerns about reducing the health and wellness requirements from three classes to two but focused mostly on the specific course on health education that PSD eliminated as a graduation requirement in 2018.
Jo Dixon, the district’s curriculum coordinator for health and physical education, noted that PSD’s three self-identified peer districts — Boulder Valley, Cherry Creek and St. Vrain — all have a health education requirement with additional wellness credits, and all have higher graduation rates than PSD.
PSD’s health education and teen choices classes cover a wide range of important lifelong skills, Dixon said, “that consist of sexual health information, disease prevention, injury prevention, managing health conditions, environment health skills to access reliable health care, communication skills, mental-health skills, refusal skills, how to collaborate and employ empathy and compassion, and to goal-set – all based around SEL (social and emotional learning), which we promote.”
The proposed new graduation requirements had originally eliminated health and wellness completely. Instead, it was reduced from three classes to two based on feedback after proposed changes were made public earlier this school year, said Dwyane Schmitz, PSD's chief institutional effectiveness officer. He and Chaplain headed up the action team that worked on revising the requirements as part of the district’s strategic “graduate with options” plan.
Also retained through that process was the required 10 credits of fine and applied arts that would have been eliminated under the original proposal.
Superintendent Brian Kingsley praised the work of the action team.
“We may not agree on the end outcome, and that’s OK,” Kingsley said. “But the fact that we’ve changed and iterated on that process as a result of true community feedback, I think is quite impressive.”
(Editor's note − This story was updated at 2:45 p.m. April 11 to reflect that the new requirements will not take effect until the graduating class of 2029. The requirements were originally scheduled to go into effect sooner).
PSD graduation requirements
(Beginning with Class of 2029)
Language arts − 40 credits
Mathematics − 30 credits
Science − 30 credits
Social studies − 30 credits, including 10 credits apiece of world history and U.S. history and 5 credits of civics
Financial literacy − 5 credits
Wellness − 10 credits
Fine and applied arts − 10 credits
Additional coursework − 85 credits
Total − 240 credits
Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, x.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Poudre School District's new graduation requirements approved
