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Schools

Herricks High School Students Suggest Changes

Board of education meets with students over suggestions to maintain clubs and classes.

Herricks High School students sat down with members of the board of education before the regular meeting Thursday night at the high school to offer their suggestions to maintain class offerings and clubs in the face of substantial budget cuts in the 2013-14 school year.

Among the suggestions was to offer online clubs that only occasionally meet in person. The thought behind doing this is that online clubs would have less overhead and the flexible time commitment might also be better for students.

“It may be more cliche and cool to have an underground club,” joked board trustee Dr. Sanjay Jain.

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Another idea was to offer lecture-style classes to help ensure that some classes could be maintained. Board president Christine Turner noted that this was a good suggestion, although it would only work for certain kinds of classes.

“I think limiting students to taking six or seven classes is worse than having class sizes go up,” superintendent Dr. John Bierwirth said.

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One student noted that in one of his classes, since the enrollment has increased, it takes significantly longer to get papers graded and returned which impacts students’ ability to learn and grow.

Turner said that she would like to keep class sizes down, but “financialy we just can’t afford to do that,” explaining to the students that approximately $3 million needs to be cut from the budget.

Dr. Bierwirth also told the students that they were looking at the option of offering some classes every other year if enrollment was low.

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