JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — High school seniors in Northeast Florida can breathe a sigh of relief now that Governor Ron DeSantis has signed into law a bill providing more options for students to satisfy high school graduation requirements.
This year state lawmakers proposed raising the score students would need to earn on the reading and writing portion of the SAT to satisfy a graduation requirement, which could have prevented thousands of current high school seniors from earning a diploma this year.
According to numbers Action News Jax received from local districts, 189 seniors in Clay County didn’t pass the 10th grade English Language Arts Assessment, which put their graduation at risk.
In Duval, nearly 1,200 seniors either didn’t pass the ELA Assessment or the Algebra 1 end-of-course exam and in St. Johns, 133 didn’t pass the ELA assessment.
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Students are able to satisfy their graduation requirements by earning a comparable score on the SAT or ACT, but the minimum score but during the legislative session Florida lawmakers considered raising the required score on the reading and writing section of the SAT from 430 to 480.
“Effective for this year, which affects this year’s seniors who did not see it coming,” said St. Johns County School Board Member Bev Slough.
Slough said if the requirements had been raised, it could have put 7,000 students in Florida at risk of not graduating.
In Clay County alone, it would have directly cost 107 high school seniors a diploma.
“So, superintendents, school board members, various education entities started petitioning the legislature that this wasn’t fair to that particular group of people,” said Slough.
Thanks to those efforts, lawmakers agreed to delay the test score increases by one year, and the bill was signed into law this week by Governor Ron DeSantis.
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Slough said the legislation offers some much-needed grace to the last graduating class that had their high school education interrupted by pandemic lockdowns and restrictions.
“That was the class that was the most impacted all the way through high school. So, that coupled with the fact that they didn’t know or understand that the standard was gonna be raised so they didn’t have an opportunity to retake the test or prepare themselves a little bit better, it really had a high impact,” said Slough.
Aside from the numbers provided by Clay County, it’s unclear exactly how many students in Northeast Florida will be able to graduate as a direct result of the decision to delay the increased test score requirements, but if the impact is even remotely similar to what Clay County expects, it’s likely multiple hundred.
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