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player ready...After two challenging school years dealing with the difficulties of adapting to remote learning, students at Warren Township High School District 121 will have a little less on their plate as the district announced it will lower its graduation requirements.
The district will reduce its required amount of credits that students must earn to be eligible to graduate to 18.5 after the board unanimously approved the measure at its meeting Tuesday.
Previously, students had to earn a minimum of 22.5 credits, with each semester of a class counted as one credit. Students had to earn eight credits of English classes, three in mathematics, two science credits, three social science credits, four life fitness credits, one practical or fine arts credit and 11 semesters’ worth of electives.
Those requirements will mostly stay the same, but students will be allowed to take four fewer credits of electives throughout their time in the district.
The change will impact students immediately, as it will take effect for all students currently in the district, including the class of 2022 and all students moving forward.
“For a great majority of our students, this won’t matter one bit,” Warren Township High School District 121 Superintendent John Ahlgrim said at the meeting. “We looked at some data and 82% to 83% of our students are within, or well above, our graduation requirements.”
This change comes after a difficult two years for students and staff, navigating through constantly changing mandates and guidelines during the pandemic. Ahlgrim recognized the difficulties of the most recent two school years when discussing the changes at the meeting.
“It [will] help a number of our students get to graduation and that’s ultimately what we want, for our students to successfully graduate,” Ahlgrim said.
He added that by allowing students to graduate with fewer credits than previously necessary, some students may use the opportunity to graduate early and pursue other opportunities, which Ahlgrim said should be encouraged.
“That may allow them to do some other things outside of here, which is good, and we should support those students,” he said.
In addition to making graduation a more feasible goal for some students, the reduction will also “over time” help alleviate some of the district’s deep financial woes, as it will allow for to a “slight” decline in staff, according to Ahlgrim.
“This reduction won’t make an immediate impact on our staffing, but it will over time as students won’t have too many excess requirements and it will make a slight decline in our staffing needs,” he said.
This change will also help the district if it ends up reducing its daily schedule from eight to seven periods per day due to budget constraints. That is one of the options that the district will resort to if a tax-increase referendum does not pass in 2022.
The district put a referendum on the ballot in April 2021 hoping to raise its limiting rate by .35%, but it was rejected by voters.
Lowering the amount of credit hours will allow the district to more easily reduce the number of periods that it has in a regular school day.
The board is discussing adding a question to the 2022 ballot again asking for a limiting rate increase, and approved a measure at the meeting that would allow them to continue to pursue the idea.