(Seguin) — If it was years ago and you barely missed the opportunity to earn a high school diploma, then you might want to take note. That’s because the Seguin ISD is moving forward with a plan that it says will remind everyone that there is always a silver lining and that it is never too late.
Members of the Seguin ISD Board of Trustees Tuesday night unanimously approved a resolution that would allow the district to graduate and give a high school diploma under alternative requirements to individuals who entered the ninth grade before the 2011-2012 school year and who because of not passing a test or two wasn’t able to graduate.
Now while all the specifics of this plan have yet to be ironed out, Jason Schmidt, assistant superintendent of learning and leadership services, says the district is ready to begin piecing together a plan with hopes of reaching all those students who might just still be eligible to graduate so many years later.
“What this Texas Education Code does is provide students that did not receive a diploma due to not passing a state exam — basically these are students that entered ninth grade prior to the 2011-2012 school year. So we are going back a ways. What this does really is to kind of piggy back or kind of dovetail with Senate Bill 149 which was passed in 2014-2015 and in 2014-2015, under Senate Bill 149, students that were 11th graders or 12th graders that had passed all but two of their tests through an individual graduation committee which would be a committee made up of parents, student, educators, counselors — that type at the school, they would have the opportunity to receive a diploma — that actually expires at the end of 2019 so what this does is to allow us to go back even a little bit further,” said Schmidt.
According to the resolution, “to be eligible to graduate and receive a high school diploma under these provisions, an eligible individual must demonstrate proficiency to the satisfaction of a local graduation committee in the content areas related to the assessments on which the individual has not performed satisfactorily.
Schmidt says this concept is very new and is just starting to pick up steam with other districts across the state. He says the Seguin ISD wanted to do its part to help give its own former students a second chance.
“We all know the importance of a diploma and if we can, through committee, find other measures that a student may have undergone or if a student was successful in all of their coursework — that sort of thing — should we really continue to, I guess, kind of penalize that student by not letting them receive a diploma really from here on forward. So, this gives us an opportunity to go back and look at it. I think that most of us believe that there are other ways of measuring how productive an individual can be in society and through that committee, we hope to really kind of drill down to that level and help the students out that maybe are in that position,” said Schmidt.
Schmidt says several factors will have to be considered in helping an individual with that second chance. Some of those factors include the individual’s grade in each course in the subject areas applicable to the assessments on which they did not pass; the individual’s score on each of those failed tests; their participation in offered remediation; attendance rate and academic, work or life experience determined to be relevant by the assigned local graduation committee.
Again, the specifics on this new plan will still need to be worked out. However, with the announcement of this approved resolution, the Seguin ISD says it hopes to begin the talk and search for these potential individuals who might walk away with a high school diploma after all.