The petition
We, the following Arkansas public school students, ranging in grades from ninth (9th) to twelfth (12th), with hearty accordance, and the purposes and understanding of democracy, wish to present the following:
A petition for the dismissal or of the unofficially titled “Graduation Clause” of Arkansas Department of Education Commissioner’s Communication Memo Number LS-06-126. This unofficial titled “Graduation Clause” as we will refer to states: “Therefore, the inability to waive the 178 days of student-teacher interaction time simply means attendance must be accurately reported on these days inclusive of, but not limited to kindergarten screening, Career Action Planning (CAP) conferences, and official release of graduating seniors.” (A full text of Memo LS-06-126 is provided bellow.) By our understanding, the clause establishes that all students, including graduating seniors, are to be in school, until the school completes its one hundred and seventy eighth(178th) teacher-student interaction day. This, will result in the postponement of most senior graduations.
Graduation is a hard and time consuming job for seniors, teachers, school counselors, and many other officials. To our knowledge the entire reason schools traditionally offered seniors the early out was because of all the paper work that is involved in preparing their seniors to graduate: final tests, compiling grades, calculating grade point averages, filing transcripts, filling out diplomas, and many more tasks. On top of this, most of the same has to be done with other students not graduating, too much to do for the school officials in a single week. Also, many summer college courses start the first full week of June (this year, 2007, is the week of June fourth(4th) through the eighth(8th)) and in order to comply to the “Graduation Clause” of Memo LS-06-126, most schools’ graduations must be held the last school day of May (this year, 2007, June the 1st since May 31st is on a Thursday), giving these seniors who wish to take summer courses one (1) weekend (two (2) days) to travel to the campus, register, receive rooming, get settled, learn their way around the campus, all in just two (2) days. So to accommodate all the above and more, seniors have traditionally graduated earlier than the proposed new date.
In our high school history, we have seen senior half days outlawed, vending machines restricted, and been tested more than ever in our lives. We simple ask for the only one think a senior has to look forward to, outside of going to college – to be allowed to graduate one at least one week earlier than the rest of the school is released so we can prepare to go to college and to rest up before we have to go back to school.
We have invested fourteen years of our lives to our education system already. Applying some of what we have learned, we the undersigned Arkansas public school students petition our elected officials who helped established the above mentioned rules and laws.
-The Arkansan League of Students
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