A high school senior walks across the stage in June, diploma in hand. Her family cheers. Teachers applaud. The program says she is career ready and prepared for the future. Three months later, she is sitting in a community college placement office being told she must take remedial reading and math. She does not understand. Her parents are stunned. No one ever said this would happen. No one explained that the credits she earned through substitutions, waivers, and alternative pathways would not prepare her for what came next. That moment is the danger of this bill. This legislation expands flexibility in graduation requirements in dozens of ways. Credit substitutions. Waived instructional time. Alternative assessments. Credential swaps. Each option sounds reasonable on its own. Taken together, they create a system where a diploma can mean very different things depending on the school division, the student’s advocate, and how standards are interpreted. The risk is not that students will fail to graduate. The risk is that students will graduate believing they are ready when they are not. As requirements become more complex and customizable, transparency disappears. Families lose clarity. Students lose leverage. And the burden of navigating the system falls hardest on those with the least time, resources, or access to information. A diploma should be a promise. It should signal readiness and opportunity, not uncertainty. This bill may be well intentioned, but without clear guardrails and consistent standards, it risks turning graduation into a matter of completion rather than preparation. Flexibility should expand opportunity, not quietly lower expectations or obscure the truth.