The Warren County Public Schools Board of Education approved new graduation requirements Thursday that include a newly state-mandated financial literacy course for students who entered ninth grade after July 1, 2025.

Greenwood and South Warren high schools are removing their digital literacy class requirement to make room for the financial literacy course, WCPS Assistant Superintendent Sarah Johnson said. To meet Kentucky’s technology standards, WCPS is still embedding the technology component of digital literacy into courses, such as through artificial intelligence, Canva, slideshows, Google Forms, image creation and presentations, she said.

The Kentucky General Assembly enacted the law last legislative session through House Bill 342. The law has a financial literacy requirement satisfiable through courses such as budgeting, saving and investing, credit and debt, insurance and risk management, taxes, the critical review of documents and ability to sign them.

With the Impact Center opening, WCPS is also updating its graduation requirements to make its scholastic and academic diplomas more consistent, Johnson said. The main change is that South Warren, which has required four courses in social studies and four in science, will now require three each to align with WCPS’s other high schools — giving South Warren students an opening for an elective, she added.

Draft budget

WCPS has developed its draft budget of $306 million, said WCPS Chief Financial Officer Chris McIntyre — an amount that he added is a rollover of last semester’s working budget as a conservative estimated budget, given that state funding hasn’t been quantified yet.

The Kentucky General Assembly is in the midst of developing its biennial budget, meaning it hasn’t yet determined public school funding from Kentucky’s foundational funding formula, the Support Education Excellence in Kentucky program.

One predictable fluctuation is County Employees Retirement System contribution rate, which decreased from 18.62% to 17.43%. But McIntyre said that the amount the contribution reduction may save typically equates to very few dollars relative to the overall budget, so he typically won’t account for it in the draft budget.

The May tentative budget, which functions as a guiding document for the upcoming school year, will be more substantive, he said.

“I always feel the draft budget’s a little premature because there’s (so many) variables out there unknown at this point in time that unless there’s something we know is coming down the pipe that I really need to adjust for in the draft budget, typically just roll our working budget as the draft budget as a conservative estimate,” he said.

Oakland Elementary design

Oakland Elementary, slated for August 2030, had its design development documents approved by the board Thursday, featuring an overall layout very similar to the upcoming Summit View Elementary: the same 90,000 square footage with insulated concrete forms serving about 850 students, said McIntyre, who’s also the district’s chief operations officer.

Like Summit View Elementary, it’ll have a storm shelter, a secure vestibule for safe entry, and a keyless FOB entry system, McIntyre said. The design will change little from the footprint of the last five school facilities WCPS has built, he added.

The facade will be somewhat unique, like the other elementary schools, and WCPS is finalizing the building’s overall theme, McIntyre said. WCPS is about 25% through finalizing what the building will look like, he added.