statewide proposal to require local school

districts to provide remedial classes for college

preparatory graduates who need them should have

little impact on students in Fayette County,

according to figures presented to the Fayette

County Board of Education by Stuart Bennett,

assistant superintendent for curriculum and

instruction.

He

said that in some universities, 40 percent of

college prep graduates need remedial classes.

Fayette County has about 94 percent of its

graduates going to college directly after high

school, Bennett said, with fewer than 4 percent

needing remedial classes. "We have 80

percent of our graduates receiving the HOPE

scholarship and have a 70 percent retention rate,

the highest in Georgia," Bennett said.

Because

of the high number of college freshmen needing

remedial classes statewide, Lynda Schrenko, state

superintendent of schools, and the Georgia School

Superintendents Association are electing to offer

all public high school graduates with college

prep diplomas a guarantee that they could return

to their school districts to take the necessary

classes. Bennett said the district could

accommodate this through evening school, summer

school, or possibly even through a day program.

The

proposal is an effort to make schools statewide

more accountable and to discourage colleges from

accepting students who did not take the

appropriate classes in high school, or who are

unprepared for college-level work, according to

John DeCotis, Fayette County's school

superintendent.

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