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Seneca Valley High School has great expectations for its students, and next year the bar will be set even higher.

The school's revised four-year academic plan aims to keep students from taking five or six years to graduate. Beginning in the 2010-11 school year, students will be encouraged to meet annual benchmarks for Student Service Learning hours, earned by participating in approved community service and school activities, as well as required to make up certain mandatory classes in summer school or High School Plus, free classes offered during or after the regular school day, if they fail instead of repeating the course the following year. Some summer school classes cost tuition, which may be waived if a student has a financial hardship.

Seneca Valley expects to begin offering a International Baccalaureate Diploma program next year and has modified its Career Academies, which focus on a broad occupational area and include four to six classes over a three-year period, to allow IB students to participate. Students choose a career pathway, or focus, within their academy and attend field trips and lectures related to their field.

There were 42 students who graduated from Seneca Valley last year who spent more than four years at the school, said Principal Dennis Queen, who is in his second year at the Germantown school.

The revised four-year academic plan is similar to the school system's plan for high school students except that Seneca Valley is targeting courses to be completed in the year they were intended to be, Queen said. It is not uncommon for freshmen to take classes with 19-year-olds, he said.

Staff had to create tasks last year for students who were in danger of not graduating because of missing SSL hours, something that will not be done this year, Queen said. The SSL benchmarks will not be mandatory for students to move to the next grade. Students will also be required to take either the SAT, ACT or Accuplacer test to earn a diploma and will not be allowed to have a half-day schedule if they are not on track to graduate.

Seneca Valley and John F. Kennedy High School are in the process of phasing out the University of Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of Education Programs in favor of the equally rigorous IB.

Seneca Valley expects to find out whether it has been approved for the program in April, Queen said.

Kennedy expects to find out whether it has been approved to offer an IB curriculum in February, Principal Thomas Anderson said.

The number of pathways, or focuses, within the school's Career Academies will be reduced from 27 to 13, coordinator Jeff Baker said, though current students can finish the pathway they started with. The extended essay required by the IB program can also be used as an academy capstone project, which is a research project, internship, creative project or college course required to complete an academy.

"Personally, I'm not satisfied if kids are comfortably going through four years," Queen said. "We have a lot of kids in our building who are incredibly bright, but they are doing the bare minimum that's required of them to graduate. Motivating the kids is a big issue."