MHS improves upon class variety

Julianna Poe, Sports Editor

With the 2019-2020 school year upon us, more than 15 class changes have been established to supply students with both a wide variety of courses and a better understanding of what each class has in store.

“[Manhattan High] now offers 90+ concurrent credit hours,” mathematics department chair Ted Dawdy said. “Students on a college path can be ahead when graduating from MHS. Students on a technical certification path can get [their schooling] completed faster and be into the workforce making money faster by getting requirements taken while still in high school.”

The Career Technical Education Department has undergone many changes this year. According to CTE department chair Chris Holborn, you can now receive up to 12 hours of college credit from the available accounting classes. Additionally, three new classes have been added: Fashion Trends, Teaching as a Career and Biomedical Innovations. 

Some CTE classes have been renamed in place of Project Management. Digital Media Design and Production has revised its name to Digital Media Publications Design with the hope to better illustrate what the class offers; newspaper and yearbook production. The other CTE changes concerns the automotive classes. 

“In the auto classes we offer at [MHS], a big change is that we are now having actual instructors from MATC come and teach those classes at the high school,” Holborn said. “So there’s two instructors that will be coming.”

Two English courses — Advanced American Literature Composition and Advanced Humanities and Composition — have been dropped this year because the classes Advanced Placement Language and Composition, AP Literature and Composition and Manhattan Technical College Composition I and II already give students the means to explore advanced coursework in their junior and senior years. In addition, the “advanced” ninth and 10th grade classes are now referred to as “accelerated.”

“Our hope is that the change in course title will more accurately reflect the intent of the course, which is to provide the opportunity for any student willing to accept the challenge to study literature and writing at deeper levels,” english language arts department chair Mary Kris Roberson said.

Manhattan High’s math department not only made several alterations this year, but also completed ongoing changes from last year. Along with dropping Intermediate Algebra, Algebra B — former pathway class from Algebra A — was removed. The new courses available this year are Technical Math I and II and Elementary Statistics, all of which are MATC concurrent classes.

“MATC has added the Tech Math courses at other schools in the area and had asked if we would be interested,” Dawdy said. “The course they are replacing, Intermediate Algebra, did not count for qualified admissions so it didn’t have a value for that. This allowed us to offer more classes that had college credit.”

Under the social science department there are three new college credit classes: American Ethnic Studies — taught through K-State — and U.S. History I and II, which are through MATC.

“Since both of the [new social science] classes are college level, the hope is that students will gain an understanding of the expectations and requirements of [a] college level class,” social science department chair Amy Doering said, “and [that the courses will] help inform them of whether college is something that they want to pursue and let them know just what the workload is going to be.”

While many course changes have been made, the opportunity for improvement is continuous. MHS is always looking to improve their variety of classes and the quality of the content taught. 

“The overarching goal is to have the richest curriculum possible,” Dawdy said. “This is just the process of making it richer.”