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GENEVA – Geneva High School students will have a choice for three new courses and three modified existing courses in the 2023-24 school year.
The school board voted to accept the additions and course changes Nov. 15.
Associate Principal Doug Drexler had said at the Oct. 24 meeting that the proposed additions and changes had been vetted by the academic departments, building leadership and administrative teams, middle schools’ principals and administrators at the district level.
“We feel that these are positive changes to help students,” Superintendent Kent Mutchler said at the October meeting.
New courses:
• Investment Management in the Business Department
• Modern Mass Media in the English Department
• AP Macroeconomics in the Social Studies Department
Modified courses:
• Yearbook Production in the Art Department
• Honors Precalculus in the Math Department
• Teaching Internship in the Teacher Education Department
Drexler said investment management is a topic that has become increasingly important, not just for adults but for students.
“We’ve noticed that there are a lot of students that have an interest in this area,” Drexler said. “When they take our existing personal finance class, they take a stock market unit and it’s really of interest to students.”
The course is meant to meet the needs of students planning to pursue business studies after high school, but also the average consumer, “who is going to wrestle with this topic for the duration of their lifetime,” Drexler said.
The new elective would be a semesterlong course for juniors and seniors that would satisfy the state’s requirement for consumer education, Drexler said.
The Modern Mass Media course would assist students in evaluating national and international media content and analyze trends in information, persuasion and entertainment.
It would qualify as a dual credit with Waubonsee Community College, Drexler said. Students would earn high school credit toward their diploma and a college credit at Waubonsee that could be transferred to any post-secondary school they would attend, he said.
“We do have a lot of students who are planning communications majors or minors after high school,” Drexler said. “So the communications field is increasingly relevant to any field students go into. And having an understanding of how that process works and how different variables in our society work to message effectively – it’s a little bit of marketing, it’s a little bit of speech communication, a little bit of entertainment analysis. It’s a very high-interest course.”
As for the AP Macroeconomics course, Drexler said the high school currently has an economics elective.
“What we’ve noticed over the past few years, we have a lot of students in the spring semester who will take AP Government,” Drexler said. “It’s a one semester, spring-only Advanced Placement course. But those same students are looking for a full year of social studies to satisfy college requirements.”
Drexler said 90% of those students take the economics course in the fall.
This course would be adding the AP economics as an option for those students to take in the fall that backs up to the AP government class that most of those students are going to take in the spring, Drexler said.
“It’s another pathway to get a full year of AP social studies credit as a junior or a senior,” he said.
Regarding the modified courses, Drexler said a yearbook production course already exists; the proposal is to open it up to sophomores and allow juniors and seniors to take it a second time as Advanced Yearbook Production if they take on a leadership within that graphic design layout program.
As for the modified math program, Drexler said the school has offered an honors precalculus class.
“The College Board is releasing an AP precalculus curriculum for next year, along with a corresponding exam in May,” Drexler said. “The course we teach currently, honors precalculus, is 99.9% aligned already with the AP precalculus curriculum. So this really is just a name change along with opportunity now for the students to take an AP exam in May.”
The modification to the school’s existing teacher internship program is to allow students to repeat that as well if for a different grade level or different discipline, he said.