Dear Hawaii State Department of Education,
Hawaii Public Schools have been filled with a variety of classes and filled with dedicated teachers. Your decisions on education in Hawaii have driven graduates to success after high school.
However, currently you have boosted up the requirements for graduation. We are required to take 4 years of English, 4 years of History, 3 years of Science, and 3 years of Math in order to graduate. That leaves us with about 6 ½ electives since Physical Education and Health take 3 semester classes. Then with the 6 ½ electives we need to take a 2 year classes of a foreign language, which then leaves us with 4 ½ electives. I say that's not enough classes for electives in order to explore and find out what we want to do in the future. High School is not only about academics and your core classes but it is about finding out what you want to do in life after college or high school. When you keep increasing the amount of classes required for graduation, we don’t have the class periods to take classes like Business, or IET, or Graphics, or even Photography to find what we really want to do with our live.
As a sophomore at Moanalua High School, I only have one true elective class this years and it is Business Core. I have my 4 core classes: English II, U.S. History, Basic Physics, and Algebra II. Then one of my electives is for my foreign language, which is Japanese 1. Junior Year, I only have one elective. I will have my 4 core classes: English III, World History, Chemistry, and Trigonometry, then one elective for Japanese 2. Since I only had one elective I decided to take Photography 1, however two other elective I wanted to take was an Accounting class and take IET Core. I can’t take it since I only have one period for an elective class. Then senior year, I will only have one elective again. Since I am taking 4 years of core classes since it looks good on college applications and I am taking Japanese 3 for foreign language. So it looks like I will only had 4 ½ elective classes open in my schedule.
The only way to open up my schedule and get more electives on my schedule is to go to summer school. Going to summer school is difficult since I travel in the summer for volleyball so I am unable to go to summer school. Decreasing the graduation requirements will allow students to have more elective classes in order for them to find themselves and find something they want to do in life. Or you should have the schools give us more class periods and longer days in order to have more electives.
Sincerely,
Mikayla Domingo
