School program needs support, not audit

Our elder child will be a junior in high school next fall, supposing there are no glaring surprises on this term's report card. It's a point in time when students and parents need to get serious about what college their child might attend. Getting into selective colleges and universities is more competitive than ever. Wealthy people hire consultants to advise parents and teens through the admissions process. The rest of us rely on high school guidance counselors, books, Web sites, the advice of friends or relatives with older children and our own experiences.

Newsweek now ranks the nation's top high schools. One of the metrics of the magazine's rating system is whether a school has an International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. Many colleges and universities give additional consideration in their admissions processes to students who complete this program.

Salt Lake City's West High School, which has offered the IB program for 20 years, ranked 282nd among Newsweek's 1,350 top high schools list for 2007. West was the highest-ranking Utah school on the list.

If you attend West High's commencement exercises Thursday night, you will observe that a good many of the graduates earned IB diplomas or partial IB diplomas. Taking rigorous classes pays off in terms of higher scores on college admission tests and successful completion of college. As taxpayers, parents and future employers, it's something that we should demand.

Not on Utah's Capitol Hill. When a handful of lawmakers had the audacity to ask the Utah Legislature for a $300,00 appropriation for this program, they got the once over. International Baccalaureate? Sounds anti-American! Quick, let's conduct a legislative audit before this outfit gets more of a toehold in Utah. We can't have school districts and school community councils negotiating contracts with international concerns.

Sheesh.

As if it takes an audit. A simple telephone call to the participating school districts or schools would answer any questions state lawmakers might have. Instead of paying for an audit, lawmakers could appropriate the money that would have been spent on an audit on the IB program.

As for entering contracts with international organizations, it's fair to surmise that any school with foreign exchange students, study abroad programs or character education programs that perform service work outside the U.S. enter into legal contracts with people in other countries. Does the Legislature want to micromanage that, too?