PHOTO: Photo by Seyi Ariyo on Unsplash.
The Archuleta School District Board of Education again considered revisions to Pagosa Springs High School’s graduation requirements at its December 12, 2023, meeting…
— from an article by Robert Moore in the Pagosa Springs SUN, January 11, 2024.
Graduation is pretty serious business. And the Archuleta School District is apparently taking it seriously. They discussed graduation requirements in June, and then again, in December. And it sounds like they are going to discuss them further, in the future.
According to PSHS Principal Sean O’Donnell, the high school has “looked at nine other districts … about two-thirds of the schools that we looked at, they require you to pass 75 percent to 79 percent of your courses to graduate. A third of them are in that 80 percent to 82 percent range.”
At PSHS, you have to pass almost 88% of your classes to graduate. Which implies that PSHS students work harder than any of the other school surveyed by the PSHS staff.
Is this fair? To make our student work harder than at other schools?
Our School Board seems to think so, to judge from their December 12 comments. So do some of the staff.
Wouldn’t that mean the staff would have to work harder?
That’s not exactly our style here in Pagosa. The reason we moved here: so we could call in sick, whenever Wolf Creek gets fresh powder.
But there’s another issue. Graduation rates. The harder you make your students work, the more likely they will fail, or drop out, and that will lower your graduation rate, which then makes you look worse than the other schools.
Life is already tough for kids, living in Pagosa Springs, without making them pass so many classes. Especially, math and English.
Back when I was working at McDonald’s — before I landed this cushy gig at the Daily Post — the only math I needed was counting correct change. And half the time, the customer didn’t even know whether I counted correctly.
English? Luckily, my mom had bought me the Collected Works of William Shakespeare when I was still in middle school. So, at a young age, I had already read the declaration in Julius Caesar:
“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”
Morbid, but true. And also, correct English usage. Few writers could handle a semicolon like Shakespeare.
This quote could be paraphrased:
“Cowards drop out many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of high school graduation but once.”
Not quite as elegant as Shakespeare, but it does include the word, “graduation”. (Something that wasn’t as important in Julius Caesar’s day, apparently.)
Some of the staff were unhappy with the proposed changes to the graduation requirements. It seems, with the proposed changes, a student would need to pass only four English classes, instead of the five English classes now required. Five English classes seems like a lot to me, when most of your writing will be composed by your phone’s text message app… or better yet, by ChatGPT.
I mean, how many years should it really take, to learn how to spell “LOL” and “OMG”?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.