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Indiana Department of Education rebuilds new diploma standards plan after negative feedback

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INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Department of Education is scraping their new plans for high school diploma standards and presenting a new plan after overwhelmingly negative feedback on their first plan.

"We just got feedback that we needed simplify and we needed to streamline and I heard that from a lot of different people and stakeholders," Dr. Katie Jenner the Indiana Secretary of Education said.

The first plan, that would have created two diploma options and eliminated the requirements to take math classes all four years, is now a thing of the past.

The old plan also included plans to no longer require economics, world history and geography. Requirements would have been wiped out for fine arts, foreign language and career and technical education.

Negative feedback came from all areas, including Purdue University's president Mung Chiang.

On Wednesday, after scraping the plan, the Department of Education announced a new plan that will now go through similar stages of feedback and review.

The new proposal has been streamlined and simplified to include one base diploma with minimum and flexible requirements for every student. You can see the break down by clicking here.

"We are a little bit more comfortable with this obviously," Randy Hudgins, a teacher at Warren Central High School, said. "I'd have to see kind of how the overall proposal is structured and what the details are on that."

The new plan adds two STEM courses, additional English credits, U.S. Government and U.S. History.

Economics remains a non-requirement, but can still be offered in schools.

The new plan does keep work-based learning in paid or unpaid positions.