Request By:
Mr. Elwood Cornett, Director
Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative
P.O. Box 1118
Hazard, Kentucky 41701
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Robert L. Chenoweth, Assistant Attorney General
As the Director of the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative you have asked the Office of the Attorney General whether a school district may require secondary students to attend four years of high school even though the number of required credits have been acquired in three and one-half years. You also have asked if a school district desires to require eight semesters, what policy or procedure would be suggested.
Your questions are ones frequently asked and ones for which our answer is supported only through general provisions of our Kentucky school laws. It is our opinion that a local school board has the discretionary power and authority to structure course offerings so as to require attendance in a school district for eight school semesters before graduation. KRS 160.290. We do believe if a school district is going to go to such a requirement, it should be implemented in a way as not to prejudice those students who have already scheduled a part of their high school course work so as to permit early graduation. Serious consideration should be given by the school district desiring to adopt such a policy to make it applicable initially to the first-year high school class at the time of adoption.
We have not been unmindful of the authority of the State Board for Elementary and Secondary Education in areas such as are under consideration here. KRS 156.160, as amended in 1978 by Senate Bill 289, Section 90, copy attached, still gives authority to the State Board for Elementary and Secondary Education to adopt rules and regulations on the "minimum courses of study for the different grades and kinds of common schools, and regulations governing educational equipment of the schools" and "grading, classifying and accrediting all common schools, and for determining the scope of instruction that may be offered in the different classes of schools, and the minimum requirements for graduation from the courses offered." However, neither of these two areas would preclude a local school board from structuring its course offerings in the way above discussed.