FARMINGTON — The Mt. Blue Regional School District Board of Directors is considering a request to drop the policy that requires students to demonstrate they are competent at the second-year level in a world language in order to graduate.

World language faculty members at Mt. Blue high School say the requirement was ill conceived and should be discontinued.

If the board agrees, the new policy would go into effect immediately. Directors are expected to vote on the policy change at their April 5 meeting at Mt. Blue Middle School in Farmington .

Between five and 10 students this year are currently at risk for not graduating due to their poor language grades, French and Spanish teacher Gordon LePage said.

“It is very difficult to maintain that requirement,” department Chair Lisa Dalrymple told directors last week during the first reading of the graduation requirements policy.

The loss of the elementary school foreign language due to budget cuts eliminated the district’s feeder program, she said.

LePage said the two-year language requirement was initiated by the Department of Education and was not done with consultation by any teachers.

“I have no doubt the policy was well-intended,” he said in a prepared statement. “It was not implemented with the express purpose of presenting insurmountable hurdles to students  … but I like to think that if a challenge has stakes as high as a graduation requirement, it exists for reasons that benefit all students and harm none, from the most gifted to those who struggle with reading, writing and auditory processing.”

Students going on to four-year colleges are already taking courses beyond the minimum requirements, he said.

“Instead, it is harming those who don’t really need it,” he said. “We need — urgently — to reexamine it,” he said.

Academically high-risk students already face obstacles to their graduation. A foreign language requirement adds one more, LePage said.

Discontinuing the policy will allow the language faculty as well as those in academic support services and alternative education to concentrate on the essential standards that remain in place at Mt. Blue, he said.

“It will remove an unnecessary obstacle to many students who struggle with language but are working diligently in the aim of graduating,” he said.

He said students being hurt by the existing policy are those who have pulled together all the essential requirements in math, English, and science but “who may be forced to drop out because they could not satisfy a foreign language requirement that is not needed for their postsecondary school program.”

“We should not be naive in thinking that a student who is struggling to keep his head above water in English is suddenly going to be buoyed by French,” LePage said.

French, he said, could very well sink that student right out of high school.

Superintendent Michael Cormier said the state gave all school districts a list of curriculum changes that would be required once the state funded 55 percent of the cost of education under a change approved by voters in 2004. That is far from happening, he said.