PENDLETON — The top priority of educators is to make sure when students graduate high school they are ready for the next step of life by heading to college, a trade school, or straight into the workforce.
Indiana Department of Education has tasked all district officials with creating a new Graduation Pathways Plan starting with the Class 2023, currently students in eighth grade.
South Madison Community School Corp. leaders presented and approved their plan during a school board meeting in September.
They’re planning to become early adopters of the program, Assistant Superintendent Mark Hall said.
Some Pendleton Heights students will use the pathways plan to meet graduation requirements, beginning with the Class of 2019.
The idea behind the program allows every student to have a customized route to graduation.
“There will probably not be two students who complete the pathway in the same way,” Hall said.
There are three requirements of the plan — earning an Indiana high school diploma, demonstrating employable skills and posessing post-secondary readiness competencies — with several options under each.
One of the biggest changes to the program requirements is students no longer have to pass a state standardized test to graduate.
Eventually, the pathway plan will require all 11th-grade students to take a college or career readiness test, such as the SAT, to meet graduation requirements, but the test has not been selected by the state yet, Hall said, and no minimum performance level will be required for graduation.
Students, however, will have to meet one of three employability skills options: Project-based learning experience, service-based learning experience or work-based learning experience.
District leaders based requirements for their plan on guidance provided by the State Board of Education, through conversations with area school districts, and by looking at course offerings and activities in the district.
They conducted several meetings involving high school administrators and guidance counselors to look at state requirements and to see how they could provide a pathway for students while ensuring students are getting quality educational experiences.
District leaders said they anticipate exploring the addition of courses and activities to the program to enhance the local Graduation Pathways Plan as they move forward implementing requirements, Hall said.
Hall said he likes the overall idea behind the program and the three required components: a diploma, employable skills and being academically prepared for college or a career.
Removing the graduation requirement of passing a standardized test in 10th grade is also a step in the right direction, he said, particularly since the newest version of the ISTEP+ 10 assessments have proven to be a poor measure of student learning.
Hall said he believes the verdict is still out on what difference the pathways program will make in preparing students for life after high school. However, he said the pathways idea has value because it seeks to make what is required to graduate more relevant to life after high school.
“The skills that will be developed and measured will hopefully prove to be more beneficial than just taking a series of standardized tests in language arts and math,” Hall said.
The biggest challenge they’re working through is developing a system to keep track of the various forms of documentation. District officials said they anticipate software companies might develop products for schools to use for this purpose in the near future.
