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A pair of actions taken on the state and local levels last week — both of which could euphemistically be categorized as “life lessons” — served as yet another reminder of just how wide-ranging, sometimes painfully, it can be to educate our children.

As the Oregon Legislature raced to wrap up its turmoil-laden session, a bill was sent to Gov. Tina Kotek, with wide bipartisan support, that beginning in 2027 would require high school students to complete programs in personal finance and college/career skills before they could graduate.

At once, the measure seems like a throwback to the practical, non-academic classes of an earlier age and, at the same time, facing up to the reality that not all graduates enter the next phase of their lives with the basic foundational steps to independence.

The personal finance segment will cover building credit, creating and managing a budget, opening bank accounts and understanding taxes.

The skills portion will cover such topics as resume writing, job and college applications, and how to advocate for other needs as they navigate the transition from high school.

“This bill will help ensure our young people are leaving school with the skills they need,” said Senate President Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego, “to make good financial decisions now and throughout their lives.”

These requirements, though, are just one side of the coin when it comes to what has made its way through Salem. Lawmakers — acknowledging that high school students are entering a world where the worst obstacles are not to fill out forms or balance a checkbook — have also passed legislation requiring curriculum on the danger of fentanyl and the prevention of sex trafficking.

And it’s those more difficult “life lessons’ that were on display last week in Medford, as Oakdale Middle School was the stage for a very complex, and all-too-real, drill on the procedures involved in an active shooter emergency.

Students, parents, teachers and staff members took part in the event — which brought multiple emergency responders to the campus to assist the “wounded,” rescue others who were “trapped,” and to identify and subdue the “assailant.”

This, too, is the world faced by those who work, teach and learn inside school walls.

“They are perishable skills; and we can table-top it, we can talk about it,” said Ron Havniear, director of security for the Medford School District, “but it’s different when you get out there and actually do it.”

How different was evident by the arrival of a Mercy Flights helicopter and ambulances to take the wounded to nearby hospitals for the next part of the exercise — while those determined to have “died” were covered with a red tarp.

Superintendent Bret Champion added that it was lessons not only from other school shootings nationally, but also the Almeda Fire that helped spur this organized, inter-agency effort.

“We can’t control a lot of things,” he said. “But we can control learning what our muscles can do when we train with them.”

Generations schooled on the Three R’s (even though only one of them began with an R), or did duck-and-cover drills under the “safety” of their desks might not recognize the necessary evolution of education evidenced by the Legislature and the Medford School District, but the end-goal is the same.

Prepare students for what awaits them — even those moments we pray never come.