Mar 22, 2016 3 min read

BURGETTSTOWN – High school seniors will have more realistic options for math classes and will have to take a fine arts class as Burgettstown school directors unanimously approved changes Monday.

Parents whose children are on the cusp of the 5-year-old age requirement can now appeal to have tests administered to admit them to kindergarten.

“This puts us in line with other districts’ policies that allow parents to go through private evaluations to demonstrate a readiness for school at an earlier age.

“Our cutoff date is Sept. 1, so if your birthday is Sept. 5, you would have been sitting out school for a year,” Superintendent James Walsh said.

Rising seniors in the class of 2017 will be the first allowed to take six credits in math compared to the current requirement of eight. In 2020, a single fine art class will be required for a student to graduate.

The change in policy, Walsh said, was borne out of data from Keystone Exams and graduate job placement.

“About 55 of our 100 graduates last year went to college. The other 45 went to military, two-year training schools or directly into the workforce.

“But they, too, were required to take four years of math and struggled mightily with precalculus, which is probably not a course that would be relevant to them. So we’re developing a new course, something like a consumer and financial literacy class,” Walsh said.

Students sometimes struggled with Keystone Exams in their freshman and sophomore years, Walsh said, and that led to state-mandated remediation courses doubling up in their junior and senior years, which added to more stress and further difficulty for students already struggling with math.

“There would be kids talking geometry and algebra in the same year and taking more difficult courses when some of them aren’t math kids. Let’s make a senior math an option,” Walsh said, “because we were one of the few districts requiring four years of math. It seems like a good move in supporting students and with the safe assumption that kids going to college will take four years of math anyway.”

Gov. Tom Wolf signed into law Feb. 3 a two-year moratorium on Keystone Exams to be counted as a graduation requirement. Students are still taking and preparing for future versions of the test.

The test is expected to be revised to better reflect subject proficiency in algebra, biology and literature in 2018-19 testing years, according to Senate Bill 880, which mandated a state Department of Education report on ongoing revisions six months from the date of the bill’s signing.