News

An early move for one graduate

By Scott Wagar

05/28/2013

For Cole Kainz, graduating from Bottineau High School on Sunday afternoon was a huge accomplishment, especially if you consider that just five months ago he was only 16 years old when he learned he would be allowed to graduate from BHS a full year ahead of his classmates.

Kainz, who is junior at Bottineau High School, and just turned 17 in February, was given permission to graduate from Bottineau High School with the Class of 2013 due to his academic standing in school and his determination to advance to a higher education institution.

“Halfway through the year I looked at my credit lists and realized I had enough credits to graduate early, all I had to do was complete my requirements” Kainz said. “I thought if I have all these credits done, and I have all these requirements done, I might as well move on to college as quickly as possible. Just move on to the next step in life.”

Kainz added that he had been taking college courses at Dakota College at Bottineau since the tenth grade with good marks and felt that since he was seeing success in his college coursework he should advance to the college setting. “I thought to myself that if I am already taking college classes I might as well go to college,” he said.

According to North Dakota law, a student must be a junior in high school in order to take college courses. Kainz stated that his father, Fred Kainz, made a request to allow Cole to take a college course, which was granted to him. During his first college course as a tenth grader he received an “A” in the course.

Getting permission to graduate from high school a year early wasn’t an easy task for Kainz due to his age and school policy.

“It was against policy to graduate without seven semesters of high school. I would only had six when I applied for graduation,” said Kainz, who stated that he had to create a special case and present it to Bottineau’s school board and superintendent to be granted the chance to graduate early. “I had to put together a power point, give a speech, show them my grade point average and explain I was taking college courses and that I was doing very well in them. I had to show them I could do this.”

In the end, the school board was impressed with Kainz and approved his request to graduate this year.

To understand Kainz’s accomplishment, it is believed that only one other student in Bottineau High School’s history has received permission to graduate as a junior.

Kainz will be attending North Dakota State University this fall and planning to major in electrical engineering.

For Kainz, he said he has enjoyed his journey to an early graduation.

“It’s been fun,” he said.