Lodi Unified may extend modified graduation requirements

Trustees indicate support; vote coming at future meeting

As the COVID-19 pandemic approaches its one-year mark, Lodi Unified School District administrators are again contemplating modifying graduation requirements for this year’s senior class.

Jeff Palmquist, the district’s assistant superintendent of secondary education, told the Lodi Unified Board of Education on Tuesday night that many students are struggling with grades and maintaining credits as a result of distance learning.

“We have a number of students (on track to graduate), but it’s about 4 or 5% lower than last year who have more than 200 credits — which is

fantastic, but we have a higher number of students that are right on that cusp, who have no margin for error,” he said.

While no action was taken Tuesday night, Palmquist asked the board to consider three options before the Class of 2021 graduates in June.

Those options included maintaining the current graduation requirement of 230 credits, or simply lowering the requirement to the state minimum of 210 credits. A third option would be to make the same modifications the board approved last year, which was tp lower graduation credit requirements to 210 as well as reduce English class requirements from four years to the state minimum of three.

The graduation rate in 2020 was 87.9%, Palmquist said, which was higher than 2018’s rate of 85.9%, but lower than 2019’s rate of 89.9%.

“We took (2020’s graduation rate) as some evidence that the action the board took last year really met the challenge we were facing, because we didn’t see this exorbitant graduation rate, but we also didn’t see a very low one I know we were very concerned about,” he said.

Last spring, Palmquist said credit reduction would benefit as many as 180 seniors, about 60% of whom attended continuation high schools.

At that time, some board members favored a temporary, one-time reduction with a review a year later.

“I’d like to see what we did for the 2020 graduates, to extend that to the 2021 graduates,” board member Ron Heberle said Tuesday.

Board chair Ron Freitas agreed, requesting that a proposal return to the board as an action item at a future meeting.

“The bottom line once again comes around to through no fault of their own, students were not able to attend the last quarter of last year,” Freitas said. “That obviously affected their ability to obtain units that they would need for graduation. It wasn’t their fault we weren’t able to provide those units, and we’re still seeing the repercussions of that.”