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Jacklyn Hernandez’s plans to shop for dorm-room essentials and to visit with family before heading to college came to a crashing halt Monday morning when she received a call from the high school from which she’d recently graduated.

Hernandez is one of 12 recent Burges High School graduates who found out that a counseling error is forcing them back to the classroom to fulfill a course requirement they thought they had already completed.

Hernandez and most of the other students took forensics instead of the required physics for their fourth year of science at the suggestion of a counselor.

Now the students are spending the next two weeks at Burges to fulfill their graduation requirements.

“I’m pretty upset about it,” said Hernandez, who graduated No. 15 in her class. “I could understand if it was the beginning of the summer, but two weeks before leaving is ridiculous.”

Burges Principal Randall Woods said he is working with each family to help them get through the difficult situation.

“My role is to take care of the kids and make sure they get everything done so down the road nothing comes back to them and affects their future,” he said. “We’ve been meeting with parents and doing home visits and asking how we can fix this and move forward.”

James Anderson, assistant superintendent of high schools for the El Paso Independent School district, said there are steps in place at every high school to ensure something like this does not happen.

“This was an isolated event to one counselor who failed to complete all the processes we have in place at all of the campuses,” Anderson said. “In this one case we did not have all that follow-through.”

Anderson said normal summer school runs four weeks, so the district is providing additional help for students to complete the course “as fast and hard as they can.” He said they will work with each student for as long as it takes to complete the course successfully.

“We do realize it was a mistake on our part so we’re doing everything we can to make it easier on our students by offering these classes morning till night with a real teacher to help them get through the course and get through the material,” he said.

Hernandez estimates she will spend about five to six hours a day for the next two weeks to complete a year of physics before heading to Texas State University in San Marcos.

Hernandez said not only is the situation putting additional stress on what should have been a memorable last couple of weeks in El Paso, it takes away from her graduation.

“It kind of feels like graduation was a complete fake,” she said.

EPISD Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia acknowledged this was an oversight of one counselor at Burges High School, which was NEIGHBORHOODS
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discovered when another counselor noticed a student who did not fulfill credits and investigated the whole graduating class.

Now that the mistake has been recognized, Garcia said the district is taking actions to rectify the situation and work with each student.

“At the end of the day, this was human error,” Garcia said. “We made a mistake.”

He said at this point they are not worried about disciplinary actions for the counselor, but will review the situation and take appropriate action after the students are taken care of.

But the students affected just want the whole thing to be over.

“I thought I was done with high school,” said Claudia Beltran, another recent Burges graduate affected by the counseling oversight.

Beltran, who also graduated in the top 10 percent of her class, said she was busy preparing to move to her new dorm at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio in a couple weeks and now has to drop all her plans to fulfill a problem that was not her fault.

“I’m leaving in two weeks,” she said. “If I don’t finish this, I’m going to have to take college and high school courses (at the same time).”

Angel Chavez, Beltran’s roommate at St. Mary’s, said the news came to a shock to her as well.

“We’ve never even heard of this requirement,” Chavez said.

Chavez, who graduated No. 13 in her class, said if she had been told she needed physics, she would have taken it. She is currently in Phoenix visiting her father and is taking the physics course online.

She is worried about doing well in the course and may have to cut her time short with her dad to come back to El Paso so she could receive a grade she is satisfied with.

“I’m not happy,” she said. “I was over high school.”

Emma Sanchez, Chavez’s mother, said she feels like her daughter and the other students will be the ones to suffer in this situation.

“This is a big disappointment,” she said. “My daughter did everything right.”

While most students were lacking a physics credit, there were a few that were short a Spanish credit, district officials said.

Students could test out of some of the courses, but not physics.

As far as jeopardizing students’ registration at universities, “We’ll work with individual universities to make sure we get it done,” Garcia said.

He also said the district will “beef up” its staff development for counseling and take steps to be sure something like this does not happen again.

“We want to apologize to the inconvenience to each student and parent this affected; we certainly believe this is an isolated incident,” Garcia said.

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