The Chesapeake Bay Foundation is crying foul over a new state regulation supposedly requiring all Maryland high school students to learn about the environment.
The Annapolis-based environmental group says the state Department of Education has left a "giant loophole" in the rule it proposed earlier this month that would allow school districts to avoid doing anything more or different to educate their students about the environment.
"In September, the Maryland State Board of Education voted unanimously to make environmental literacy part of the curriculum," my colleague Liz Bowie reported today in The Baltimore Sun. "However, it is not clear whether the vote made it a graduation requirement."
The board's vote, which came at the urging of a task force appointed by Gov. Martin O'Malley, left it up to local public school systems to decide how to make sure their students learn about environmental science and policy, but required each district to report on what it's doing every five years.
The new regulation, published Jan. 3, says students can fulfill the environmental literacy requirement by taking social studies or science courses or an AP Environmental Science course. Or, it says, they could take a locally developed environmental science course. It does not specifically state that environmental topics must be included in the social studies or science courses.