Curriculum Changes and Proposals, Part 2
The second aspect of the curriculum presentation at the January BOE meeting involved the potential to add more courses for our students through online opportunities. All of these courses will be elective, and many will have dual credit opportunities. The goal of offering these will be to align courses in some manner with career interests of our students. These offerings will be a mix of college level courses, from Butler County Community College or the Flint Hills Technical College, while some are high school level courses taken through our Edgenuity (VPL) platform of courses. The courses taken through Butler County, at least at this time, are free to students with the exception of an enrollment fee and books. The same is true for all technical courses taken through the Flint Hills Technical College. Some FHTC courses require students to also pay for tools specific to the courses taken.
As of this time there is no charge for the Edgenuity courses that may be offered. This is because we contract with Edgenuity to be able to provide selected courses online for students. The crux here is that we currently contract and pay for a set number of students (12) to be online at any given time. So, we are exploring how we can best expand the number of students allowed access to these courses at any one time. Chances are, providing our budget will allow, we will have to contract for more access to the list of courses we will offer students.
The potential expansion of our course offerings for our students is a positive thing. It is even better if we are able to find courses that match our student’s Individual Plans of Study to meet their career interests. To this end, these are but some of the offerings we hope to add to our curricular offerings.
Butler County:
- Public Speaking
- Art & Music Appreciation
- Fitness for Life
- American Federal Government
- Developmental Psychology
- Sociology
- Intro to Literature I
- And more
Flint Hills Technical College
Online individual course offerings:
- Courses in Interactive Multimedia Design
- Courses in Emergency Service Technology
- Courses in Power Plant Technology
Onsite program offerings:
- Interactive Multimedia Design
- Computer Program and Design (seniors only)
- Network Technology (seniors only)
- Graphic Arts Technology (seniors only)
- Health Occupation Technology (seniors only)
- Welding Technology (seniors only)
- Construction Technology
- Computerized Machine Tools Engineering Technology
- Industrial Engineering Technology
- Hospitality/Culinary Arts (seniors only)
- Business Administrative Technology
Edgenuity
- Computer Applications: Office 2010 A & B
- Computer Science
- Game Design
- Intro to Information Technology A & B
- Digital Arts
- Audio Engineering
- 3d Art Modeling
- Healthy Living
- Intro to Health Sciences
- Medical Terminology
- Nursing Assistant A & B
- Engineering Design
- Personal Finance
- And more
These are in addition to the many fantastic course options that we currently offer for our students at CGHS.
One significant consideration for taking many of these courses is that these are all online instruction oriented. This then relies on the student’s maturity, their level of self-discipline to be responsible for keeping up with expectations without an adult checking on them all the time. Having said this, high school is a good time to learn how to be involved in these types of course offerings. More and more colleges are requiring online coursework from students. Learning to do this now can save money and frustration when our students leave for college.
It is our hope that we are able to provide for more course offerings that meet all of our student’s interests. We hope that this is a start in a positive direction.