With the new school year comes a wide variety of new opportunities: To make new friends, to get better grades, to try a new sport, the list goes on. The Wrangell School District is helping provide some of these opportunities by providing new classes this year. At the high school level, students can get a jumpstart on their college careers with AP physics. Meanwhile, in Stikine Middle School, "Encore" classes are being provided to let kids explore different avenues of education.
According to teacher Donna Massin, her AP physics class is the first of its kind in Wrangell High School, to her knowledge. As an advanced placement class, she said, many universities will accept the class for college credit, depending on the student's end-of-the-year test. She said that the class is usually made up of students in 11th and 12th grade, so those who are starting to put serious thought into their post-high school education. That may not always be the case going forward, she added, since a number of students in the district have been rising through math courses at a rapid pace. There are several advantages to taking an AP class, she said.
"One aspect is money saving ... much less than a college class," Massin said. "Depending on what you're going into it could take care of some of your general ed requirements. Even if you're not going into science you can have that taken care of, and just to get an idea of what the coursework would be like."
High school students are not the only ones with new opportunities this year. Secondary School Principal David Macri said that the middle school is providing kids with "Encore" classes to help expand their interests. There are about half a dozen of these classes this year, he said, and include drama, debate, health, and home economics.
"Middle school is actually more of an exploratory nature than high school," Macri said. "High school is a little more direct, but in middle school they get to explore so you need to have a lot of choices out there for students to get into."
These are not elective classes, Macri said, the students are placed into these classes without their choice. This may not sound "exploratory" as Macri said, but he explained that the Encore classes are designed to expand students' horizons and let them know what kind of opportunities they can pursue later on in their education. If middle school students stick with what is familiar to them then they cannot grow, he said. It is meant to show the students what is out there.
"This is just good schooling," Macri said. "This is schooling that should be offered to every adolescent under the age of 15, 16, so that they have an opportunity to actually see some different things than what they're used to seeing."
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