High school gives students a chance to explore their interests through clubs, classes, and elective classes. However, some of the elective classes do not have a high enough level of enrollment to run, and students must find other ways to pursue their interests outside of school.
“There are no other direct options, but for some of our advanced classes that we don’t offer here, some students have gone over to CLC to be able to take a course and set up transfer credit. This year we have a student who wanted to take a science course that we don’t offer, and they’re going to go over to CLC and transfer the credit back in here. There are those kinds of things, and we’ve had students in the past who take a bus over to Central to be able to take a course over there,” said associate principal of curriculum Dr. Jeff Schagrin.
Many students do not have the time in their schedule to take a bus to another school and still get to their normal classes on time. Because of this, the art teachers have made their own solutions.
“We try to find the best solution. Ceramics 2 didn’t run this year as well, and four of the students that wanted to take Ceramics 2 took Honors Studio instead. So they got to do the Ceramics 2 curriculum in the fall semester, and in the spring semester they’re working more independently and exploring what they want to in ceramics,” said art teacher Susan Foecking.
These modified and reduced classes happen because of low enrollment. Students have to weigh the options of what classes they want to take and what they need to take, meaning the more optional classes get overlooked.
“I feel as if students have to weigh what’s important for them to take as well and are trying to figure out ‘what do I have to take and what do I really want to take,’ and maybe they want to take these classes but it’s not offered the right hour,” Foecking said.
The English teachers have their own way to prepare for elective classes. They are surveying the students about what classes they are interesting in taking.
“It’s why we’ve given the survey out. Hopefully a majority of the student body will respond because we want to understand whether these new electives will be interesting, and if they are, what impact that might have on another elective. We need to know if we’ll be okay to shut down a section or two of Writing Workshop if it means we’re enrolling in Diverse Voices,” said English department chair Susan Nielsen.