Changes planned at high school

There will be a few changes at Hot Springs County High School next year with a move to six periods of 60 minutes each rather than the seven periods of 55 minutes they are experiencing now.

At Tuesday night’s school board meeting, principal Breez Daniels said not only are they looking at a period change, but a change in the schedules for Fridays as well.

“We want to keep everything,” she said, “just concentrate it down more.”

Another issue that has arisen is possible damage taking online classes is doing to out-going seniors.

“They need to be very careful about eligibility for scholarships,” Daniels noted, “especially athletic scholarships.”

When entering college, students who have taken online college courses are actually burning up their eligibility as they are not entering school as a ‘true’ freshman. Students are also finding that a lot of those credits don’t transfer to the college of their choice.

“We have been sold on ‘collecting credits’ by junior colleges,” Daniels said, “but that’s not necessarily a good thing. We need to concentrate (the offerings) on core subjects.”

Another question that has arisen is students arriving on campus with no idea how to study. Right now, there appears to be a lot of downtime within classrooms so students get any homework they may have done during class time.

While this helps with them being able to have more family time or time for sports and activities, the students are not learning to study and Daniels believes this is an item the district needs to take a hard look at.