A8
LOCAL
Wallowa County Chieftain
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Civics requirement to earn diploma is coming
By RONALD BOND
Wallowa County Chieftain
ENTERPRISE
—
Implementing the civics
requirement voted on by
the Oregon House will be a
piece of cake at Enterprise
High School.
That’s because it is
already part of the required
curriculum for a student to
graduate at EHS.
The rest of the state will
soon be in the same posi-
tion after Senate Bill 513
passed the House by a
unanimous 60-0 vote Mon-
day, May 24.
The bill, which earlier
passed the senate by a vote
of 25-3 and goes into eff ect
for the 2025-26 school
year, requires that high
school graduates in Oregon
have at least one semes-
ter, or half a credit, of civ-
ics among the 24 credits
needed to complete high
school.
Tom Nordtvedt, social
studies teacher at EHS, said
that standard is already in
place.
“Civics has been a grad-
uation requirement at
EHS for years,” he said.
“Implementing the new
state requirement will be
easy for us because we are
already doing it.”
In fact, he said, EHS
will benefi t from the fact
that it will be a statewide
mandate.
“That all students in the
state will need to take it
will help us out because in
the past, when a new stu-
dent transfers in, they often
have not been required to
take it in the school they
are coming from. It makes
it tricky to work it into their
schedule. Now that all stu-
dents in the state will take
it, we will not have that
complication.”
The Oregon Capital
Bureau reported that Dem-
ocratic Rep. Paul Evans,
the chief sponsor for the
bill, had tried three pre-
vious times to get the bill
passed, and spoke on its
importance.
“It is a bill that begins
Evans said.
Nordtvedt off ered a sim-
ilar take in approving the
bill’s passage.
“I like that they are
requiring it statewide
because it is important for
“I LIKE THAT THEY ARE REQUIRING
IT STATEWIDE BECAUSE IT IS
IMPORTANT FOR KIDS TO LEARN
AND KNOW CIVICS SO THEY CAN BE
INFORMED CITIZENS, VOTERS, ETC.”
— Tom Nordtvedt, social studies teacher at EHS
the process of holding our
schools accountable for
teaching the next genera-
tion of Oregonians how to
operate the most complex,
complicated and often con-
founding form of self-gov-
ernance in human history,”
kids to learn and know civ-
ics so they can be informed
citizens, voters, etc.,” he
said.
Cody Lathrop, a Wal-
lowa High School social
studies teacher, has been
“kind of following” the
developments with the bill.
While he thinks there
could be some good that
comes from the bill, he
also expressed some con-
cern about what ultimately
may come with the chang-
ing requirement.
“As with everything in
the standardized world in
education, they try to put a
square peg in a round hole,”
he said. “Some of these
requirements, because it is
such a fl uid transition and
it is going to take a little bit
of time, there is going to
be some trepidation on my
part to see what it entails. ...
What kind of standardiza-
tion? What kind of teach-
ing standards are we going
to apply? All our standards
are arbitrary and culturally
relative to your location.”
He said the “nuts and
bolts” of the bill will come
out in the implementa-
tion process in the next
few years. Lathrop added
he won’t teach a topic
that isn’t applicable to his
students.
He warned, too, that the
details may not prove to be
as good as they sound on
paper.
“In everything that the
state pushes down, espe-
cially with the standardiza-
tion, they all sound great,
just because they use cer-
tain terms,” he said. “When
you start actually dissect-
ing it, sometimes it maybe
even isn’t feasible. It’s a
decent bill, something we
can look at, but there is
always the inevitable. My
biggest worry is there is
going to be cultural appro-
priation or cultural rela-
tivity that is going to be
mandated.
“In my experience in
education, any time there
is fl owery language, there
is usually something ugly
underneath. I’m hoping
that’s not the case.”
NOBLE
GIVES US A GLIMPSE
OF THE
~James E. Faust
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