Six months after Benicia Unified School District halted its proposed new high school graduation requirements, the discussion was reopened in a forum at Benicia High School on Tuesday night.

The school board held a study session in January to discuss proposed new graduation requirements and went into further detail at its regular March 16 meeting.The proposed requirements— which would have gone into effect starting with the class of 2022— aimed to increase college readiness for all students and were modeled after the UC system’s A-G requirements. These conditions included requiring an extra year of science, an extra year of math, two years of the same world language, one year of a visual or performing art and one year of a new ninth-grade course titled “Get Focused.” The requirements were unanimously approved as part of the consent calendar at the board’s April 6 meeting.

As the faculty, student body and community became more aware of the requirements, they began expressing their concerns about the lack of staff and parental input and potentially decreased space for multiple art and elective courses. These concerns were expressed at a May forum at Benicia High and during the public comment portion of the June 1 school board meeting. After the district heard people’s concerns, the board voted to freeze the discussion and reinstate the previous graduation requirements. That discussion was resumed Tuesday, beginning with a community forum.

Superintendent Dr. Charles Young said the goal of the presentation was not to provide a new proposal but to engage the community on the topic. He said that for the initial proposal, the District Office had worked closely with the school board and Benicia High’s administration.

“The intention of that effort was to look at the graduation requirements and have that discussion about ‘If we adopted the A-G requirements— which are the requirements that qualify a student to get into a UC or CSU–, would that be a good way for the district to help increase the number of students who graduate college and career ready?,’” he said.

Young felt the district did a good job in communicating with the school board and administration but could have done a better job engaging with students and parents on the matter. Therefore, the discussion was halted in June when the board voted to revert back to the previous requirements, but Young said the conservation would continue.

“I think this is an important conversation to have with the community,” he said. “We want your thoughts, we want your input.”

“Our effort is to make sure we’re continually reflective about what we offer our students as they move through our system because we understand our world is changing very rapidly,” he added.
“The demands of the workplace are much different than when we went to high school and we went to college. We feel it’s important to look at what we offer and keep thinking about what the world of work is asking of students and what universities are asking for because we want to create as many opportunities for our students as possible.”

Principal Brianna Kleinschmidt went over some data points, including comparing Benicia High’s requirements with the state requirements as well as what UCs and CSUs were asking for. For instance, the state requires high schoolers to take two years of physical education, which is not a requirement for four-year colleges.

“We have to take into consideration our state requirements, and we also want to take into consideration what are the courses we want our students to have to be best prepared to move on to postsecondary,” she said.

Kleinschmidt also provided self-reported statistics from the class of 2017. Just before they graduated, they went to Naviance and filled out a survey on postsecondary plans.

“It doesn’t make it actual data because they could have changed their minds,” she said, “but (it’s) helpful for us to see what students are planning to do.”

According to the survey, 42.7 percent of 2017 graduates said they planned to go to a four-year college, 38.3 percent planned on attending a two-year college, 5.2 percent planned on going directly to a job, 3.6 percent intended to join the military and 1.4 percent prepared to go to a technical or vocational school. Additionally, Kleinschmidt said counselors pulled all seniors’ transcripts and found that 43 percent met A-G requirements, which was a decrease of 6.5 percent from the previous year.

Kleinschmidt also went over the requirements of neighboring districts with similar graduation rates to BUSD. She noted that Acalanes Union High School District— which serves the high schools of the Lamorinda region as well as Las Lomas in Walnut Creek— adopted new requirements in 2016 for the class of 2020 and beyond. Its requirements are mostly similar to BUSD’s with the exception of three years of math, a “breadth requirement,” which requires two years of a world language, American Sign Language or Career Technical Education (CTE), in addition to one year of visual and performing arts.

Other differences she noted were three years of math and two years of the same world language at Napa Valley Unified School District, two years of a CTE pathway at Travis Unified and three years of math at Martinez Unified.

Finally, Dr. Leslie Beatson, the assistant superintendent of educational services, went over the state’s new Dashboard system, which measures California school districts on such factors as how students perform on the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), graduation rates and suspension rates. It also measures college and career readiness through the College and Career Indicator. Districts are graded in this category by how many students have a diploma plus any of the following indicators: a passing score on two Advanced Placement exams, a score of 3 or higher on the SBAC’s math and English Language Arts (ELA) exams, completion of A-G or passing score on either SBAC exam, and completion of CTE pathway AND passing score on either SBAC exam. In California, students can also take a semester of dual enrollment, which BHS does not currently have.

At the conclusion of the forum, attendees went into the lobby where they wrote their suggestions and concerns on pieces of paper. Suggestions included revamping the elementary and middle school curriculums to give high schoolers more foundation, giving students the opportunity to opt out of the new requirements if requested, increasing required units to 240 while allowing students to choose how to fill the time in a way that works for them and increasing the number of periods to seven to allow for more options to take elective and CTE courses. Others recommended keeping the requirements as is.

Another forum on graduation requirements, this time for students, will be held in the Performing Arts Building today at 2:45.