I have been a public school student for almost 13 years now, and as such have learned to accept that there are certain things I just can’t control. These things are often the fault of the bureaucracy in our school and district, and the fact that we high school students are treated not like the near-adults we are, but like developmentally challenged sheep when it comes to making educational decisions for ourselves. For example, I resigned myself long ago to the fact that the district insists that I take two semesters of “fine arts” credit, even though anyone who has seen me draw or heard me trying to sing knows that I am not, as some might put it, artistically inclined. The powers that be insist that taking these classes will benefit me more than, say, taking an extra Language Arts class, and I have learned to acknowledge that. However, if I had to sit through a semester of acting exercises, several of which ended in humiliation and physical pain, I expect the school to give me credit for it.

Recently, a sizeable group of second-semester seniors was called to the counseling office, just before five-week grades were due to be published. They were told that, oops, turns out the district has decided that certain theater classes they all took freshman year from one teacher don’t actually count for fine arts credit, because the teacher wasn’t “certified” to give them. Now they are all missing a graduation requirement.

This is completely inexcusable on so many levels. Waiting until the middle of these students’ final semester to drop the bomb that they’re missing a class, after assuring them for three years that it would count? Maybe that would be more understandable if the district had just informed the school that there was a problem, but I took one of those classes freshman year and my counselor told me that it wouldn’t count as fine arts way back in October. Yet the school neglected to make the information common knowledge until now, thereby forcing seniors to drop classes out of their full schedules to take fine arts classes.

This whole mess can be chalked up to horrible bureaucratic stupidity: the district is saying that classes have to be grouped by their code prefixes. Therefore, at my senior meeting in October, I was told that my drama class from freshman year can no longer count as a fine arts credit. According to this logic, the same classes we took our freshman year will count as fine arts this year, because the teacher is now certified. It is the same class, taught by the same teacher. This teacher hasn’t changed the curriculum, but the district is petty enough to deny credit to graduating seniors based on a code prefix, even though it is now giving credit for the exact same class. In fact, the school put some seniors back into the same class that didn’t count freshman year, so they could get the credit this semester.

One of the things that’s so upsetting is that the district clearly doesn’t care what students are learning, as long as the class names match up to its arbitrary requirements. If the men and women in charge at Garfield and at the district were thinking about these students’ educations, they would have warned them before five weeks into the semester. They would realize that the material taught in the class has the same value despite the prefix on the code. If they cared about students’ futures, they would not punish them for somebody else’s clerical mistake by pulling them out of an honors physics class and throwing them, bewildered, into a music class. The worst part is, there is no reason that they couldn’t make an exception. This is certainly a unique situation, it came about through no fault of the students’ own, and it would be better for everyone if things were allowed to continue without messing up a bunch of schedules. But that would actually make sense, and that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?