I believe this (below) is the relevant section of the statute. The key is that the student must be enrolled in grade 8, but after that, as long as the credits are recognized by the high school, anything goes. You may also wish to look up credit by examination, using the highest stakes examinations used by your state. It does not appear that the statute allows for converting high school level coursework taken prior to grade 8 to high school credit otherwise. The IEP does allow for alternate graduation and credit acquisition pathways, but the regulations on this appear to refer consistently to students who complete courses without meeting end-of-course examination requirements.
Your friend might want to inquire as to how they plan to count the DE credits. Typically, a semester credit of college translates to a whole-year unit of high school credit, so a full-on DE program such as the one proposed by her school would result in students accumulating many excess HS credits beyond those necessary for graduation. As it happens, my place of employment is also piloting a DE cohort-based program with a local CC that results in AA degrees along with HS diplomas. It's still a bit raw, but definitely has potential. She may wish to ask how much flexibility there is for him to take courses that differ from the cohort. In our building, faculty from the CC come to our campus to teach face-to-face classes, which is fine for most of the cohort, but limits the offerings for outliers like your friend's child.
Our state just generally allows DE credit in HS with permission of the HS administrators, although it conventionally (outside of cohorts like the one we've started) applies only to 11/12 graders.
"Grade 8 acceleration for diploma credit.
Public school students in grade 8 shall have the opportunity to take high school courses in mathematics and in at least one of the following areas...
Credit may be awarded for an accelerated course only when at least one of the following conditions has been met:
accelerated students attend classes in a high school with high school students and pass the course on the same basis as the high school students. Credit is awarded by the high school; or
the student passes the course and the associated State proficiency examination or -- examination, when available. The credit must be accepted as a transfer credit by all registered -- high schools; or
in cases where no appropriate State assessment is available, the student passes a course in the middle, junior high or intermediate school that has been approved for high school credit by the public school district superintendent(s), or his or her designee(s), or the district(s) where the middle, junior high or intermediate school and the high school are located.
Such opportunity shall be provided subject to the following conditions:
The superintendent, or his or her designee, shall determine whether a student has demonstrated readiness in each subject in which he or she asks to begin high school courses in the eighth grade leading to a diploma.
A student shall be awarded high school credit for such courses only if such student passes a -- examination, a second language proficiency examination when available, or a career and technical education proficiency examination, or, if no such examinations are available, a locally developed examination that establishes student performance at a high school level as determined by the principal.
Courses taken pursuant to this subdivision may be substituted for the appropriate requirements set forth in subdivision (c) of this section."
EDIT: it occurs to me that one loophole would be to grade-advance a student to eighth grade, and then retain them in that grade until they were felt to be holistically ready to move into a nominal high school placement. Retention is usually a building-based decision made collaboratively with the parent, with few hard-and-fast rules, but many (sub)urban legends (although Light's Retention Scale has been around for generations as a "discussion tool", and likely inspired the IAS, for the other direction). My mother actually did something similar with one of my siblings, in a lower grade, mainly because she found a sympathetic teacher, who was willing to fully individualize, while enabling social participation in the classroom environment.
Last edited by aeh; 05/29/19 06:22 PM. Reason: typos & an additional thought
