In an upcoming St. Charles School District board meeting in November, they will be approving or denying the idea of lowering the number of credits needed for graduation at SCHS and SCW. Currently, the high schools need a total of 28 credits to graduate. Only a few districts in Missouri require this, most only require 24. In order to accommodate for the need of four fewer credits, the daily schedules would need to change. The board is considering three different versions of a new schedule.
“One is a traditional seven period day with fifty minute classes,” Principal Dr. Ted Happel said. “You go to every class, every day. There is no AIP in that.”
The second option is very similar to Hardin Middle Schools’s schedule. Students would have 46 minute classes with a 30ish minute AIP/homeroom.
The last possibility is a hybrid model. Monday, Tuesday, and Friday would be all seven classes with no AIP. On Wednesday students would go to their even-numbered classes and AIP, and on Thursday they would go to their odd-numbered classes and AIP. Because there are more odd classes than even, AIP would be different.
“Let’s say Wednesday you did your even classes, you would have an 80 minute AIP. Then on Thursday you would go to all your odd classes and have a 50 minute AIP,” Happel said.
This decision is not made by our principals, it is solely based on the decision of the school district board. They have a meeting this November to talk about the possibility of lowering the credits, and the idea is to start the process of planning the new schedule then.
“This would be either next year or the year after to give us time to get the logistics,” Happel said.
From a teacher’s perspective, this gives them over 1000 more instructional minutes. The school is judged by our EOC score. It is difficult to compete with other schools that have this schedule because they have many more hours learning the content than our students do. For some teachers, more teaching minutes is the only benefit.
“We should pride ourselves on being a district that has high standards,” English teacher Skye Reichert said. “They have already changed the percentage rate for passing to make a D from 65 to 60 percent. I personally don’t think that it’s the right call.”
Although Reichert has strong opinions about this matter, she understands that if the credits do get approved, the schedules would need to be changed. From a student’s point of view, they are surprised and confused.
“It is very interesting. I don’t think students expected this change,” freshman Ryan Cox said.
Cox continues to stress that this will give students less time to do homework because all of our work in every class would potentially be due the next day. From a second point of view, sophomore Benjamin Clemons does not think this a good idea.
“I don’t like it because it’s going to be too many classes per day, and teachers are still going to be handing out homework. It’s just going to be really stressful,” Clemons said. “I don’t think they should change it because our scores are low.”
