06/01/04 -- Students who fail a state's exit exam -- required for high school graduation -- needn't lose out on getting a diploma.
To the consternation of Florida officials, at least 77 Miami public school students who failed to pass a portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), which they needed to pass to graduate -- applied for and received diplomas from North Atlantic Regional Schools (NARS) in Lewistown, Maine.
Florida Education Department officials acknowledge the practice is legal but unfortunate. "We firmly believe that a diploma in Florida should have meaning behind it, and these students have not demonstrated that they have mastered the skills that we think are important for success in life," says a department source.
To earn a high school diploma in Florida, a student must earn 24 credits, have a grade point average of 2.0, and pass the FCAT.
To the Florida students who got their diplomas from NARS, the source says, "The bottom line is you may have a diploma but it might not be accepted anywhere."
NARS Administrator Steve Moitozo says students own their credits and can choose to use them at any school that will accept them, and there's nothing unusual about the practice.
"Education officials in Florida are not pleased that students have found a way to avoid Florida's FCAT exit exam requirements," he says. "But since Maine does not require any exit exams, the students who applied and fulfilled the Maine graduation requirements had earned their diplomas."
Edwin "Buzz" Kastuck, the leader of school approval services for the Maine Department of Education, says of NARS and other establishments like it: "There's nothing that would prohibit a consumer from purchasing a diploma from this business." But the state of Maine "only recognizes that the school exists and that students who enroll are not truant from their local public school. . . . We do not recognize their grades, credits, transcripts, letters of course completion, or diplomas."
NARS was established in 1989 with 17 students. In 2003, it granted just under 450 diplomas, including about 400 from Maine and the rest from various states, Canada, and other countries, Moitozo says. Most of these students have been home schooled and want help in converting the instruction they received at home into traditional high school credits.
NARS grants diplomas to any students who can show they have earned 17.5 credits, including four in English and two in science.
The school charges $255 for every year a student wants to transfer credits. There is a $360 fee for their senior year, which includes the diploma.
"I don't quite get what all the hubbub is about," says Moitozo. "There's nothing unusual about students transferring their public school credits to a private school."
He says he was approached last fall by the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami who asked him to help the high school students. The students had been in the country for two to four years and had earned all of the necessary graduation credits from their local public high school but could not pass the reading portion of the FCAT.
"NARS administrators flew to Miami to review the situation, and found that most of these students had GPAs over 3.0 and had exceeded Maine's graduation requirements," Moitozo says. "Therefore, the students simply registered with our school, transferred their public school credits, and were awarded high school diplomas." None of the students needed to come to Maine.
"Any private school in the state of Florida could do exactly what we did," Moitozo says.
Florida does not require private school students to pass an exit exam, he notes, and one private school offered the Haitian immigrants a diploma for $4,000 apiece.
Kathy Christie, vice president of information management at the Education Commission of the States, warns that it's "a fairly risky process" to use this method of circumventing exit exams. "It could become a learning process for everyone. As it gets wider play, employers will get cognizant of it."
"People do get frustrated with the exit exams, but sometimes it's because the kids have not learned the material," she says. The end result of getting a diploma this way "is that students wind up without the skills they need."