Haverhill Public Schools administrators are rolling back certain new graduation requirements after getting feedback from the state, but forging ahead with several new course offerings. Supervisor of School Counseling Megan Arivella last week told School Committee members, the school system adopted state-recommended graduation requirements for this year’s graduating class in the aftermath of voters repealing requirements last fall. Arivella said, however, the city was unable to meet certain criteria to “make it successful.”
“You need to have a PE substitution in place, a language equivalency or placement substitution in place, you need to have certain funding which we have had to build certain (career technical education) programs, but overall, our students, we found, it was rolled out too quickly without building the capacity for it to be successful so some of our students just didn’t have enough of the credits to graduate at the time we needed them to,” she said. Arivella said that the school system is awaiting guidance from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education after voters opted to repeal the graduation requirement for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. Committee member Mikaela Laluimere encouraged administrators to prepare an additional fourth-year mathematics requirement in the future.
