The school will offer blendED classes for the 2019-2020 school year, which will be available on the course selection sheet.

“We just need to catch up a little bit,” principal Scot Finch said. “In the past, we’d offered blendED classes, but the students weren’t interested in them.”

BlendED courses usually have class in school a few times a week and the rest is done online.

“The difference with it being in high school versus being in college [is that] you’re going to have easier access to the teacher when you’re not in class with them,” Finch said. “So on those online days, [the teachers are] going to be pretty available for you to come and see them to get maybe some of the assistance you need.”

In the past, only a few students signed up for blendEd courses, and it was not enough to become a real class. However, Finch said as many as eight or nine teachers have been interested in teaching blendEd courses in the past.  

“I hate to constitute a class of ten when our teacher-student ratio is so high,” Finch said. “Most classes are 25 [students] and over, and then we’ll have a class of ten [with a blended class]. There’s about 20 kids that are missing out on something, so they go into a class that’s larger.”

Junior Abigail Mascorro previously took a blendEd course at Creek Valley Middle School for U.S. History.

“I think the class is like you’re teaching yourself and it’s not a whole lot of in class instruction,” Mascorro said. “I didn’t really like that as much because I’d rather learn everything from a teacher. I think it’s an acquired taste. You have to want to have the outside of class time or alone time.”

The classes that would be offered in a blendEd style have not been determined. Finch said the courses offered will depend on what subject the teachers interested in instructing blendEd courses have expertise in.

“We just need to get it going,” Finch said. “I think it’s going to grow like everything else we do here whether it’s advanced placement courses or the dual-credit courses. We continue to expand our offering on those as well. So, we just need to get it going so it can explode like everything else we do here.”