I think a major problem here is one of terminology. I know that in previous conversations, the thing I took called "Trig/Pre-Calculus" turned out to be the same thing others took called "Calculus AB."
Both of these have the word "calculus" in their names, and both precede a more advanced course ("Calculus" in my case, and "Calculus BC" for others), so when we say that calculus is a requirement, what, exactly, do we mean?
I had a horrible physics teacher and ended up dropping the class pretty quickly, so while I'm not aware of any differential equations in the topic, that doesn't mean they're not there. I did go far enough in physics to get to vectoring (and then saw it again in crazy detail in post-high school education), and found that it relies heavily on trigonometry... so, whatever you call the class that teaches trig, that would be a required course for whatever level of physics does vectoring.
