Earlier this month, the Greene County School Board amended some of its policies ahead of the 2025-26 school year to better align with new state laws.

One of those policies was adding to the graduation requirements a new law that high school students have to pass a civics test that immigrants are required to take to become US citizens. Superintendent Brett Abbotts says this was an easy policy to change.

“Which, no real change for us because we’ve always done that in the past, and it’s actually a part of our government requirements that we have for our own high school. But since it is now a state requirement for a student to receive a diploma, we were required to add it to our graduation requirements.” 

Another board policy that was amended had to deal with another new state law concerning chronic absenteeism. Abbotts points out that a law was passed last year that required school districts to have a series of meetings with different school staff, and included in that process was a meeting with the county attorney, depending on the severity of the number of absences. He tells Raccoon Valley Radio the changes with the new law redefines what is considered allowed and not allowed absences and more discretion of when to have meetings with families, students and staff. 

Abbotts believes that how they handled chronic absenteeism with last year’s law worked out well for them overall.

“We had marginal improvements in our attendance, but especially those who were kind of heading towards that path of being considered chronically absent. You know, we were able to curb quite a few of those before they got to that point. So they (the meetings) were a good thing.”

Abbotts believes one of the major reasons for changing the chronic absenteeism law was for larger school districts where additional time would be taken from staff and families that had their issues with students being gone.