Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Gov. Rick Perry came to Carrollton last week for the ceremonial signing of a major piece of school legislation. But students in that district and many others across the state could be disappointed if they expected one provision of the new law to take effect immediately.

HB 3 eliminated a state mandate for high school students to take classes in health, computer skills and one of three semesters of physical education as a requirement for graduation. Local districts are allowed to retain the requirements.

School officials, lobbyists and even legislators said they had thought the new rules wouldn't kick in until the 2010-11 school year.

Instead, local school districts must decide whether the changes will go into effect for the coming school year. And that's putting school boards between parents and students, who want the new choices, and teachers and staffers, who say it's too late to make changes.

Many area districts, including Dallas, Richardson, Garland and Plano, will probably keep the old requirements for the upcoming school year. Beyond that, many are debating whether to make the changes at all.

"I don't see how you simply wipe out health," Richardson school board member Luke Davis said at a special board meeting called to discuss the issue.

The new graduation requirements comprise several paragraphs in a 180-page bill covering dozens of school-related issues passed after months of arguments and negotiation.

Legislators said the class changes were a response to complaints by school officials that earlier shifts in graduation requirements left students too little flexibility to choose beyond the mandated courses.

But even the author of the bill expected the changes to take effect for the 2010-11 school year.

"I was just as surprised as [the school officials] were," said Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands and chairman of the House Public Education Committee.

HB 3 included boilerplate language that said it would take effect Sept. 1, after the start of the upcoming school year, unless it received more than two-thirds approval in both houses of the Legislature. In that case it would take effect immediately.

To the surprise of many legislators, including Eissler, the bill passed unanimously.

The bill did not phase the changes in with incoming freshmen, as is generally the case when changes are made to graduation requirements. Instead, the Texas Education Agency informed districts July 3 that the changes were effective immediately and would apply to all students unless local districts explicitly decided not to implement them.

The bill offered no flexibility for the state agency to decide how quickly the changes could take effect or whether they could be phased in by the state, TEA spokesman DeEtta Culbertson said.

The TEA letter was the first indication to many districts that they needed to make a decision before the start of the upcoming school year.

In Richardson, for instance, such a change would have meant massive schedule shifts for thousands of students and dozens of teachers.

Richardson quickly informed parents in a phone call about the highlights of the new law without saying how the district would react. It also suggested that students stick with their preplanned schedules.

The call seemed welcome news to Peggy Beil, whose son is a rising senior at Pearce High School.

He had decided to take health and technology courses by correspondence this summer because his schedule was jammed with electives, including varsity football and two choir classes.

"When we got the call, we all said 'Yahoo!' " Beil said. "Because that meant he didn't have to do that correspondence work."

But because Richardson probably will not eliminate the course mandates, it's far from clear what Beil's son, who has not completed the correspondence courses, will need to do to graduate.

"They should not have sent that message out," she said. "We are very upset and disappointed."

The Richardson school board is scheduled to vote on the issue Monday. Many other school boards also have the HB 3 on their agendas in coming weeks.

At last week's bill signing in Carrollton, Education Commissioner Robert Scott touted the advantages he said were offered in the law's new graduation provision.

"I have two teenagers in my house, a junior this year and a sophomore, and I'll tell you, I watched them struggle with their schedules," he said.

Because of the flexibility HB 3 provides, Scott said, "I've already seen the happy faces in my house."

But students in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district probably won't be sharing in that flexibility this year, said Sheila Maher, the district's assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.

"For right now, we are probably looking at drafting a regulation for this year that will probably maintain what we're doing because of not having the staff and resources to do wholesale changes," she said.

Eissler takes no pity on local district officials who feel pressured by the new law. They had asked for more flexibility, he said.

"So local control doesn't mean local responsibility?" he asked.

On the other hand, as the former president of a local school board, he said he understood if local districts put changes on hold for a year, even though that might incur the anger of some parents. He said he knew how he would have reacted back when he was in their shoes.

"I'd probably say some bad things about the state and then do what we need to do," he said.

Staff writer Matt Peterson contributed to this report.

Here's how the state's Recommended High School Program, in which one credit is equal to one year of instruction in a subject, is changing:

* Speech must be taken as an elective until the State Board of Education revises its rules requiring that one semester of speech be taken in high school.

NOTE: Seniors in the 2009-10 school year need only three years of math and science, for a total of 24 credits, to get a diploma.

SOURCE: Texas Education Agency