With the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, regular classes begin to resume session at Foothill Technology High School (Foothill Tech), and many students are similarly beginning to return to dual enrollment classes at Ventura College (VC). With these arrivals, come new changes to Ventura Unified School District (VUSD) and the end of a state-code interpretation held by VUSD, essential for many students’ class requirements.

With the increasing power and ease of dual enrollment, average students’ schedules fill with greater numbers of college classes, both in the school year and out, and thus in-person classes at Foothill Tech begin to see less traffic. With students having unprecedentedly low period numbers, and after a notice from the state, VUSD has begun to implement new period requirements and changed dual enrollment’s ability to fill minimum course requirements.

In years prior, dual enrollment was primarily used to take desired classes that a high school did not offer and get some college credit to boot. That all changed during 2022 when large adjustments rolled in.

Since 1996, with education code 46146.5, California high schools were required to enforce a 240-minute minimum day requirement, unless a student was dual-enrolled in a community college where the requirement was brought down 25 percent to a 180-minute requirement. The new rulings also encouraged College and Career Access Pathways (CCAP) classes which entailed that college classes would be offered and more readily available at high schools — Foothill Tech implemented CCAP in the form of Advance Studies Academy (ASA) due to its close proximity to VC.

With college classes now gaining the ability to replace high school classes, classes would usually not be canceled due to low traffic if students were going to the paired college class. After these rules, one way or another, VUSD interpreted the law to imply that classes in dual enrollment would count towards the period minimum requirement.

For the 2024-2025 school year, VUSD has been notified that classes taken through the college are not to be counted toward the minimum period requirements, contrary to the prior interpretation of the district. Because of this, as of next semester, pursuant to a directive from VUSD, Foothill Tech plans to require five non-college periods per semester, but special exceptions can be made.

This change was directed to occur at the beginning of the school year but the district high schools argued implementation should begin in the latter semester. As assistant principal, Frank Davis put it, “There are kids that have already made arrangements to be in so many classes in the college” so the district allowed “for those [students] to keep going on, but begin moving toward [the period requirement next] semester.”

While VUSD has been put in a unique situation, other local districts have taken further measures to get students back in the classrooms. The Santa Barbara Community College (SBCC), for example, reacting to massive influxes of dually enrolled students, declared that college classes not only will not add to minimum course requirements (as it had since 2022 in that district) but will also be limited in the amount of classes offered to each student. SBCC now has a maximum of 11 college units per term in place. In the words of assistant principal Davis, “[The limit] is very contentious, that is not something the rest of the state agrees with.” 

Many students state dismay with the change, such as Matthew Nguyen ‘27 — a student who has taken many classes through Ventura College and did not want to see the opportunities these classes offered lost. “It’s better to let students do college classes [freely]” Nguyen said.

VUSD has been put in a very unique position, and so have Foothill Tech students. If students have relied on college courses to fill their five periods, they will potentially have to accept whatever classes are open in the school come next semester. In VUSD, college classes will maintain their ability to afford high school class credit and as far as recent information has to say, will not limit the amount of classes that can be taken.