Dupage Policy Journal

As the school year continues, students’ means to gain credit requirements and move up in grade levels have changed due to the Downers Grove Community School District School Board voting to remove passage and credit requirements.

“It’s an antiquated practice,” Superintendent Hank Thiele said during the meeting. “It does nothing for students.”

Chicago Public Schools wrote that students who didn’t meet the needed requirements to gain academic credit to move to the next grade are required to attend summer school.

Several members of the community came out to a school board meeting in July to ask questions and object to an action item that the school board had on record. They protested against the school board removing the credit hours requirements for classifying grade levels for high school students.

The school district had heated debates over an LGBT-plus book called Gender Queer, a coming-of-age story about gender identity by Maia Kobabe. Koababe said they wrote it for people of high school age and older. Shaw local reported the school board voted to keep the book in libraries.

“Inclusion matters to young people,” Josiah Poynter, a senior at Downers said, The Daily Beast reported. “This is why we must have this book in our school’s library... It brings comfort to people who feel unsolved and cast out.”

The school board explained that the paragraph citing those credit requirements was added by No Child Left Behind in 2015 and was primarily for a testing requirement and no longer served any purpose in the high school besides creating extra and unnecessary work for the administration a couple of times each year when they have to do requisite paperwork.

The board will meet again at 6:30 p.m. on Monday at the District Administrative Service Center on 6301 Springside Avenue in Downers Grove.

As the change in taking out the paragraph and credit requirements had absolutely no impact on the students’ progression or their graduation tracks and requirements, the board did vote to take out the paragraph to streamline things for administration. The vote passed 7-0 with the whole board in favor.