BY SARAH ROSS
SALEM- On a close vote, the House approved a graduation requirement Monday requiring students to apply to a post high school program before getting their diplomas.
Rep. Tobias Read’s proposal would require all Oregon students to submit applications to an apprenticeship program, a post secondary college, or the military or to attend an apprenticeship orientation in order to receive their high school diploma.
The Beaverton Democrat said he’s hoping the bill will help kids know about all of the choices that are available to them when they graduate.
“Not to suggest that college is right for everyone, but there is certainly a correlation between greater levels of education and greater levels of employment and wages,” he said. “So that’s what I’m after.”
Read said that he was not prepared to say the requirement, alone, would turn the state’s education and employment situation around but that he thinks it will help.
But some say the current economic situation is the wrong time to add this mandate onto schools.
“Given the challenges that school districts have been under in these tough economic times, unfunded mandates present significant difficulties,” said Maureen Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Beaverton School District.
Wheeler said she could see schools having trouble with the workload, saying it could pose as a “big challenge” to both small and large districts.
She noted that with the cutbacks in school days and staffs that districts are having to make, the proposed requirement would have implications for those in the counseling area that are tasked with tracking students’ completion of graduation requirements.
Rep. Julie Parrish, R-West Linn, echoed sentiments similar to the Beaverton School District. With the budget situation in Oregon, she stated that placing another mandate on schools and students is “probably not the most effective use of our time or money in a time when we’re short on time and money.”
Read, however, said that the requirement is so broad that no one really knows yet what the impact for districts will be in enforcing it, though he didn’t think it would be as much work as some people stated.
“Even if it is additional work, I think that that’s a good thing,” he said. “More people applying, more people getting the training, and likely more people employed in whatever they choose to pursue.”
Read stated he wants each district to figure out how to implement the requirement in the best way for their schools. He said some districts are already making this part of their senior projects or using it as a writing assignment in their English classes.
“I think it could fit in a variety of ways and a variety of places, and I wouldn’t presume to tell an individual school district how to do it,” he finished.
Josette Green, Executive Director for the Oregon Student Assistance Commission, said her organization supports the measure because it matches what “needs to be done” in Oregon’s economy.
She said the bill will help the economy through “getting Oregonians educated for more prosperous careers in the future.”
Green said the requirement likely would influence her department, which deals exclusively with helping students to access higher education. The department’s ASPIRE program, currently in about 115 schools around the state, specifically works with advising students on college decisions.
“We’ve got a program that’s already present and they can aid the delivery of this particular bill,” she said.
But Parrish disagreed on how much help the graduation requirement would provide.
“Sadly there’s a big chunk of parents in Oregon who feel like their kids aren’t going to have access to higher education and not because the school didn’t make them fill out an application but for money or grades or whatever,” said Parrish, adding her heart goes out to those kids.
The mandatory element of the bill, Parrish stated “doesn’t set well” with her since many of these students in fact could be rejected from the schools they apply to.
Parrish added her concern with the greater work that will be placed on Oregon colleges which would see a higher number of applicants that may not end up enrolling.
“Why would we put this burden on our K-12 and community colleges when they’re broke?” she asked.
Communications Director for Portland Community College, Dana Haynes, said that enrollment has been up at all of Oregon’s community colleges, which he said is normal during a recession.
While he said that because of the size of PCC, that school would be able to absorb more students coming from this requirement, not all schools around the state would be able to do so.
“A lot of community colleges, especially the smaller ones, are at or above their own capacity and couldn’t really take a lot more students,” said Haynes, adding the bill could present some challenges to these schools.
Parrish stressed that the requirement does not address the problem that “some of our kids are not academically prepared to go to college.”
The bill will need to pass in the State Senate before it can be signed by the governor for final approval.
Please, god. Please close the Oregon legislature for ten years so we don’t have to put with the dumb wits telling us how to do something. Next up submit: a requirement for every Oregonian to submit an application to a shoe store to understand the merits of wearing shoes.
Great. Don’t these dimwits understand that colleges charge application fees? And, it costs money to process applications?
Maybe the military doesn’t charge, but who wants to be hounded by military recruiters if they don’t intend to enlist? And, it also costs the military time and money.
Apprenticeships I know nothing about, but I would still bet it would cost real cash if this was implemented.
Another attempt to make one size fit all in education. Bad idea.
Unbelievable, ill-considered, central-planning-mindset meddling by legislators who think life can be positively manipulated by pushing a button, or writing a law. And ironic, given that the state’s secondary education system is so broken that many don’t graduate at all, and many graduate without neither sufficient literacy to read a want-ad nor sufficient numeracy to balance a checkbook or prepare a household budget, to think that making people apply to post-secondary education will IMPROVE the success rate. Ah, but if the goal is merely to attach more students to yet another broken OEA-dominated “education” opportunity, using those living but betrayed students like Matrix-battery components to support teaching position demand, I guess it makes perfect sense. Sarcasm, and frustration, intended.
This is an admission that a high school education in Oregon is worthless.
And THIS, in a state that’s rated 43rd in the nation for education quality. As well, the teacher quality and professionalism have been graded an ‘F’ — but Rep. Read ignores these problems in favor of ever more state nannyism, statist control over individual lives, ad infinitum. They think families can’t figure out what to do about their future grads? These elitist attitudes have got to go!
Keep the diploma,its not worth the paper its written on, much like our dollar. And last time I looked service to our Country was still voluntary and not mandatory.And has this idiot researched how many collage grads are on the unemployment rolls? This is just another socialist that thinks that he know what is good for the people. He reminds me of a person who once said..” Well we will just have to pass it to see whats in it won’t we.”
Well isn’t this convenient? The tax base has shriveled because of idiotic economic policies which has caused the budget of the publicly paid-for institutions of higher learning to shrink and so in order to stabilize their budgets, instead of trimming them, they’ve decided to lobby the legislature to pile on further financial burden on the average citizen in the mold of government run health care. According to the government monopolists, you now have to pay for government services whether you want them or not. The average teen will now have two choices: Go into debt or enlist in the military which will shift the debt onto the rest of the tax payers. Wealth redistribution, the answer to all problems created by collectivist B.S.