BREWER – The delay is over, and the pressure is on this year’s high school freshman class.

During the next four years, this class of students not only will have to earn enough credits to graduate, but they also will have to prove they understand what they’ve been taught.

On the line are their high school diplomas.

“I’m nervous” about the new requirements, Brewer High School freshman Katelynn “Katie” Kenney said Friday. “I’m scared about having to pass all these assessments.”

Freshmen statewide must show proficiency in five Maine Learning Results subject areas in order to earn a diploma.

Children who don’t take these assessments seriously and want to go to college or pursue other opportunities may wake up, after four years of high school, and find themselves with just a piece of paper that says, “Thanks for showing up.”

“This is a major shift from issuing diplomas based upon credits earned to a standards-based diploma,” Department of Education Commissioner Susan Gendron said Thursday. “This group of freshman students will be the first graduating class to demonstrate attainment of Maine’s Learning Results in order to earn their diploma.”

After years of being a concept, and after a one-year delay, the new Maine Learning Results requirements now are in place statewide.

Brewer School Department is among all those schools facing the new hurdle. A total of 268 Brewer freshmen must pass the assessments in order to graduate in 2008.

“The bottom line is that students will need to study harder,” Brewer High School Principal Jim Frost said Friday. “They won’t be able to just attend class and graduate – they’re going to need to understand the material.”

The new state-mandated graduation requirements were incorporated into a new policy reviewed by the Brewer School Department on Sept. 13. The district is now working to get the word out to parents.

“I just don’t think parents understand,” Superintendent Betsy Webb said Thursday. “If a student gets the 20 credits we require from passing the classes but they do not pass the proficiency demonstration, we will be awarding a certificate of attendance.”

In order to graduate with the standard-based diploma, students will have to meet the Learning Results in English, math, science, social studies and health-physical education.

“It scares me,” said Doreen Kenney, Katie’s mom, who also has a senior and a foreign exchange student at Brewer High School. “She [Katie] is my student that nothing comes easy. She studies her butt off for C’s. She doesn’t test [well], and it makes me a nervous wreck.”

At first Doreen Kenney worried that her daughter was “never going to graduate” under the new regulations. But after finding out more about the policy and the type of testing that will take place, she’s less concerned.

Students in Brewer will take up to 10 assessments a year and can retest low scores up to four times during high school.

“An assessment may be a book report, a project, a test or a portfolio,” Webb said. “We’re working hard to find a way to make it a part of what we do already but make it consistent from classroom to classroom.”

Multiple styles of assessment are important because “not everybody learns the same way,” the superintendent said.

Freshmen who should graduate in June 2008 also will have to earn the required credits to graduate.

In Brewer, students must earn 20 credits with four in English, three in math, science, history and social studies, along with one in fine arts, one in physical education and a half-credit in health, in order to graduate. Students also must demonstrate computer skills.

The certificate of attendance raised eyebrows among parents during an informational meeting held with freshmen and their parents at the beginning of school, Elaine Emery, Brewer director of instruction, said Tuesday. Approximately 150 parents and students attended the meeting.

“Their major concern was that their students wouldn’t get a diploma,” she said.

School officials assured parents that the district would be offering programs to assist students struggling with the state’s academic standards.

Each school in Maine has, or soon will have, developed a local assessment system to determine if a student has met the learning results. It’s this LAS that determines how students are tested and how often.

Each school department also will need to determine how the assessments will be tied to diplomas, said Pam Rolfe, LAS coordinator for the state Department of Education.

She said school departments are handling the requirements differently, but added “diplomas need to mean something” and that’s why the state has been working for years to come up with a program that “clearly identifies what the student has learned.”

One difference, for example, is that some schools will issue certificates of graduation and others will not, Rolfe said.

“That’s a local decision,” she said. “There is flexibility so there will be differences among schools.”

Locally, SAD 22 (Hampden, Newburgh and Winterport) approved new graduation requirement policies in January, and the Bangor School Department has had its updated graduation policy on the books for a year. Both school districts will issue diplomas and certificates of attendance.

Several issues surround the new graduation policy, including questions about students’ ability to get college financial aid or qualify for the military without a diploma, Emery said.

The fact that special education students must meet the same standards as other students is another controversial issue that “is not a local decision,” she said.

Commissioner Gendron said she has received calls from parents of special education students who are concerned for their kids.

“The law doesn’t allow us to differentiate between those students,” she said. “It’s very clear the standards are for all students. It cannot be modified.”

There are plans in the works to address the issue, but so far no exemptions to the new graduation requirements have been approved.There are also provisions in the state law that allow for a delayed award of a diploma if a student successfully completes a semester of college, and extensions that allow students more time to complete school, Emery said.

“We told parents that it may take five years to complete the four years of high school,” she said. “It’s going to transform high school as we know it.”

Parents are being told “one-third of the students will be five-year students.”

Doreen Kenney said she is still anxious about the assessments but added she likes the reasons behind the testing.

“There is a whole lot more expected of them and it’s good,” she said.