District to Guarantee Its Grads

The graduating class of 1987 at high schools in Huntington Beach, Westminster and Fountain Valley will have something besides “Pomp and Circumstance” and a diploma next June.

Every graduate will be guaranteed.

In an action believed to be the first of its kind in California, the Huntington Beach Union High School District on Monday began mailing out letters to businesses telling them that the seven high schools in the district will stand behind their products.

Beginning with the class of 1987, district Supt. Marie Otto said, graduates will be guaranteed to be able to read, write and calculate at the high school level. If a business finds a “defective” graduate from the district, that company won’t be stuck with the cost of retraining, Otto said.

Otto said the letters being mailed to Orange County businesses invite them to take the offer seriously. “I don’t think we’ll get massive complaints,” she said. “But we’re dead serious about providing free remedial training. We don’t think business should have to pay for teaching high school graduates what they should have learned in high school. We’ll pick up the bill.”

Otto’s letter said that retraining of graduates, if required, would be done at times convenient to both the business and the school district. Such retraining, Otto said, will be in the high school’s existing adult-education program, which is largely done at night. Any extra money needed to make good on the guarantee, she said, would come from the state in the form of adult-education funding.

She added that the district might have to rethink its position if it were to get a lot of immediate negative feedback about past graduates. The action produced a gleeful response in the state Department of Education offices in Sacramento. “Wow!” exclaimed department spokeswoman Susie Lange, after learning of the high school district’s “guaranteed graduates” letter.

“This is something new. It’s great. It really expresses confidence in their students. (State Supt. of Instruction) Bill Honig is going to like this.”

The guaranteed graduates are those from June, 1987, onward at Westminster High, Fountain Valley High, Huntington Beach High and four other high schools in Huntington Beach: Ocean View, Marina, Edison and Wintersburg. In addition, the district will guarantee the high school graduates of its adult evening school. Last year, there were about 3,700 graduates from the district’s high schools, Otto said.

Otto’s letters, which were being mailed to about 2,000 employers in Orange County, said: “If any graduate of this district is found to be lacking in the basic skills, we will provide retraining at no cost to the employer.”

The guarantee goes into effect with the seniors graduating this school year, but Otto, in an interview Monday, said the district is likely to provide free remedial training for previous graduates of the district if the need is shown.

“We think we can make the guarantee because we have excellent students and excellent teachers in our district,” she said. Tongue-in-cheek, she used industry jargon to explain why she thinks the high schools in her district do well: “We utilize a series of quality control factors as students pass through our system, and we’re very proud of our product.”

Otto said she came up with the “guaranteed graduates” idea after reading two recent news items. One, she said, was about a community college in the East that was guaranteeing jobs for its graduates. The second news story, she said, was about David Kearns, chairman and chief executive of Xerox Corp.

Kearns, in that story, said: “American business will have to hire more than a million new service and production workers a year who can’t read, write or count. Teaching them how, and absorbing the lost productivity while they are learning, will cost industry $25 billion a year.”

Otto said she found that prospect deplorable. “For some time,” she said, “business people have expressed understandable concern about the abilities of students who have earned diplomas from accredited high schools, but who are unable to perform adequately in areas of basic skills. . . .

“These skills should have been in place before a diploma was issued.”

Otto said teachers in the district have cheered the “guaranteed graduates” program. They know they are doing a good job and can stand behind their work, Otto said.

She added: “We feel comfortable with our guarantee. If General Motors can do it, why can’t we?”