By PAT NEWMAN
Staff Writer

A 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.