High Schools Strike Geography as a Requirement : Education: Huntington Beach district scraps ninth-grade class to provide students more academic flexibility. The course will become an elective.

Huntington Beach Union High School District trustees have voted to eliminate a ninth-grade geography class as a graduation requirement, saying that geography lessons can be integrated into history and social science classes without detriment to students.

The one-semester class will be dropped as a requirement at the start of the school year next September.

The scrapping of the class will add flexibility and give students more of an opportunity to take elective classes, officials said during a Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday night.

Though it will no longer be a requirement, geography will be continued as an elective offering.

Eric Wersching, president of the sophomore class at Ocean View High School, warned trustees before they took action that it would be “a tremendous mistake” to abandon the geography requirement.

“To understand world history, you must understand the geography of the area,” he said.

Wersching said current developments in Somalia underscore the importance of an understanding of geography.

Parent Sally Alvino said that students generally know little about geography and that the district should provide more instruction, not less.

Jackie Wexler, a district mentor teacher in geography, said in an interview that the district has been a leader in geography and that the board’s action “is a big error.”

Wexler said the decision is a move toward isolation. “Things are happening all around the world that are affecting us here,” she said.

However, Trustee Jerry Sullivan, an English professor at Cal State Long Beach who was elected board president Tuesday night, said, that “there is no reason” to believe that social science and history classes can’t be restructured to make students well versed in geography.

Edison High School Principal Brian Garland said the decision, while regrettable, is consistent with directives from the state to use cross-disciplinary approaches to subjects where possible.

“It opens up electives so that kids who can’t fit music or ceramics in, now have a slot to do so.”

Garland said social studies teachers can integrate geography into their courses successfully, but he added: “Will they get as much geography as they would in a stand-alone class? My guess is they will not.”

Valley Vista High School Principal Richard Maynard defended the board’s decision. “I think, given the (financial) situation in the district at this point, it was OK,” Maynard said. “All of us would like to be adding curriculum rather than taking it out and dispersing it. But I think it can be handled in other ways at this time.”

Former Westminster High School Principal Robert Boehme, however, said: “I bet a lot of kids don’t know where Mogadishu (in Somalia) is right now. . . . The real question is how it’s taught. It can be taught in history classes, but if you pin me down, I guess I’d say they ought to still teach it separately.”

Trustees also on Tuesday voted to eliminate computer education proficiency as a graduation requirement in another an attempt to provide more elective classes.

Recommendations for the changes were made by a 15-member committee of teachers and administrators who spent about a year on the study.

Times staff writer Jeffrey A. Perlman contributed to this report.