Dear HE'E Members and Participants,

Kathy Bryant and I attended part of the Board of Education Student Achievement Meeting this morning. The agenda item in focus was Board Policy 4540, HIgh School Graduation and Commencement Policy, in which the Department proposed revised requirements for one diploma. Please see Star Advertiser article and changes in diploma requirements. A lot of testimony was

heard today.

Board Members specifically asked for input from parents and community members. The majority of testimony was from social studies teachers concerned about the recommendation to have 3 instead of 4 social studies requirements, and give students an extra elective (7 instead of 6).  The Board is very interested in hearing from others.  

We encourage your organization to look at the proposed policy and send comments to the BOE. The board is still seeking input from the community before making a decision in July, so if your organization would like to provide input, please submit to the Board. Testimony instructions are at

http://www.hawaiiboe.net/CONNECT/Pages/SubmitTestimony.aspx. Testimony can also be submitted to boe_hawaii@notes.k12.hi.us

In addition, we ask that the policy team take a look at the BOE recommendation. Since the goal is to put together some evaluation tools, this might be a good opportunity to test them out. Please contact me, Kathy Bryant kathybryant@hawaii.rr.com or Dave Tom at dtom@goodbeginnings.org with your thoughts on how to proceed in advance of the policy team July 7 meeting.

Also, I met with the new executive director for the BOE and she gave us some guidance on how to provide input to the Board. The Board will be tackling some large policy issues such as the graduation requirement, teacher evaluation and grading methods in the next few months. The Coalition, through our policy working group, may want to discuss how best to participate in the Board policy discussions as they move forward.  They are moving quickly, but making a point that they want to work with groups such as HE'E so this is an opportunity to represent our members at the policy level.