Clymer Central School officials are in the midst of fulfilling the state’s requirement of a Portrait of a Graduate.

Released in July 2025, the Portrait of a Graduate is part of the state’s new graduation requirements. The portrait provides a vision of what it means to be a graduate in New York state and describes the skills and dispositions that all students should develop to be successful in college, careers, and civic life, according to the state Board of Regents.

Clymer officials recently updated the Clymer school board on the district’s work on the mandate. A survey has been sent to teachers with “fill in the blank” questions – learning is …, learning is not …, and I believe learning is most powerful when … with a similar survey sent to students. Beth Olson, district superintendent, said the hope is that the student data will match up with the teacher responses and prompt further conversation as to what activities go on in classrooms and what is meaning most to the students and giving the best results and engagement.

“So we’re starting to dovetail all of these things together and we talked about doing a further activity that is going to go on throughout this year, that we’re starting to think outside of the box,” Olson said. “How can we do a little bit more project-based pieces, can we do cross-curricular things, so basically putting it at the forefront of the more you can engage and find what’s going to capture the students’ interest, the better response you’re going to get from the students and ultimately the better results.”

Making already busy school administrators undergo this dog and pony show is a complete waste of time. The state Board of Regents has made clear what it wants to see in new graduation requirements – less reliance on test scores like the Regents exams and more focus on project-based learning. The exercise is a waste in Clymer. Multiplying the waste across the rest of the districts in Chautauqua County qualifies the Portrait of a Graduate as a colossal waste or time and resources. Multiply it across the rest of the state and the state Board of Regents is creating a waste of time and resources that is unfortunately all too typical of New York state.

In our view it shouldn’t require surveys and data to paint the Portrait of a Graduate. School officials know what a graduate should be able to demonstrate to earn a diploma. The state Education Department, for all the money the state spends to administer education, should know what a graduate should be able to do. Yet here we are requiring school districts to spend time painting the Portrait of a Graduate.

What a waste.