High School to Offer New Classes, Cancel Others

School officials may be changing around the course variety at Andover High School. But, with a tight budget, the introduction of new courses means the canceling of others. The Andover School Committee met Thursday night and discussed programs of study available at Andover High School for the 2011-2012 school year.

While school administration is choosing to delete eight classes from the course catalog, they'll also be adding several new classes for the next school year. On March 3 there will be a second reading of the new plans and the school committee will vote on it. 

Classes are being deleted because of lack of interest in them. Less than 10 students enrolled in them last year and year before.

“We just don’t believe these classes are relevant to our students anymore,” said   Dr. Thomas Sharkey, AHS principal.

As of right now, there are only a “handful” of classes at AHS with less than 20 students according to Sharkey. The High School is currently thinking about creating a policy for next year in which classes need more than 20 students to be taught. The reason for this is that the High School cannot afford to hold classes with less than 20 students in them.

Elective social studies is one area, however, where the school will be expanding their curriculum. Before, the vast majority of social studies electives were only offered on the AP level but now these classes will be available on all levels.

Also, there will be more language art classes offered for freshman and sophomores in hopes to boost MCAS scores.  While scores are high, school officials say that they are not satisfied with the growth from 8th-grade to 9th-grade, or from 9th-grade to 10th-grade.

Sharkey believes the cause of this is that students only have to take two language arts courses by the time they reach the end of sophomore year.

None of the new classes being offered require more staff. Registration for the 2011-2012 school year begins in March.