What do you call a kid who leaves school at the age of 15 or 16,
before graduating?
A drop-out, of course.
What do you call a kid who leaves school at the age of 15 or 16, before graduating?
A drop-out, of course.
What do you call a kid who enters school for the first time at the age of 15 or 16, before graduating?
A drop-in?
I know 11 teenagers who are planning to drop in this year, an extraordinarily large number. In an average year, I know one or two homeschooled teens who manage to persuade their parents to let them go to school, or whose parents decide, for reasons financial, emotional, academic, or medical, to send their kids to school.
Not every homeschooled teen wants to go to high school. My daughter does not, thank God, nor did either of my sons; college is good enough for them. Even some of the 11 are ambivalent: they have lives outside of school and can see that learning in lockstep with everybody else is going to be more time consuming than learning at their individualized paces.
By and large, the teens who want to go to high school want the high school experience: football games and homecoming and prom and graduation. The teens who prefer to keep homeschooling have absorbing interests outside of school: real lives.
But all these sociological aspects are only peripherally connected to what I want
to discuss. I want to discuss policy.
Now, the next seven paragraphs are gleaned from the grapevine, so I speak under correction. If any of the major players wish to correct or clarify any point, he or she may feel free to write a polite letter to the editor.
The grapevine says that there has long been a policy at Gilroy High School that credits from non-accredited high schools are not accepted.
A student from a non-accredited school, be it a “homeschool” or a more conventional private school, would enter with 0 credits. He could still enroll in sophomore, junior, or senior level classes, but would be unlikely to be able to accumulate enough credits to graduate by age 18.
Like much else, this policy was routinely ignored until Principal James Maxwell took the helm at GHS. Homeschoolers blithely enrolled at GHS as sophomores, juniors, or seniors, were awarded credits for whatever appeared on their home-generated transcripts, and collected their GHS diplomas three years, two years, or even one year later.
In June of this year, the usual one or two mothers were shocked to find out about the new – or rather, the exhumed – policy. They did what any self-respecting homeschooler would do: they said thank you, politely, and called Home School Legal Defense Association. HSLDA told them such policies are common in California. They gave up.
But one mother reacted differently. Her children are mostly schooled privately, but her eldest child had spent one year at GHS, followed by one year “homeschooling.” Prior to leaving GHS, the mother had casually asked if the child could return for senior year, and GHS had replied, just as casually, no problem.
So this mother, stymied at the high school, went to the district office, and not only got her child enrolled with full credit, but got a one-year delay on the reinstatement of the old no-credit-for-non-accredited-schoolwork policy.
Hence the 11 drop-ins. Most of them are taking advantage of the loophole before it closes.
For the first time, drop-ins will have to test to prove they are really proficient in the classes they claim to have taken. That is fair.
But I don’t think the resurrected policy is fair. GHS is a tax-supported institution, and the parents of drop-ins are taxpayers. Testing for proficiency is an easy enough matter. If a drop-in can prove proficiency in Algebra II and English Composition, he should be allowed credit for those classes. If not, he can take the classes again.
Granted, a GHS student can get an A in geometry and immediately afterwards score below basic on the test. But we will allow the GHS student to have credit for seat time. The drop-in has no seat time, so he needs to prove proficiency with a test. It is not completely fair to the drop-in, but nobody ever claimed that life was completely fair.
Cynthia Anne Walker is a homeschooling mother of three and former engineer. She is a published independent author. Her column is published in The Dispatch every week.
