Newsletter #1 - Message from High School Student by Kelcie Sweeney

Message from High School Student – Kelcie Sweeney

Kelcie Sweeney, a Scituate High School senior honors student, wrote an article for The Scituation, the SHS student newspaper. This is an excerpt of her article.
“Scituate High School experienced some major scheduling problems this year. It resulted in horror stories of schedules overloaded with study halls and requested classes replaced by fill-ins.

Why? There were several factors the guidance office had to deal with:
The freshman class was much larger than the recently graduated senior class. There was suddenly a bigger group of students divided into the same amount of classes as in years past.
There was an increase in new students, especially in the already large junior class.
The school needed to create more core classes, which in turn led to a major decrease in the number of classes that enhance students’ transcripts (aka – electives) as well as those courses that provide career connections such as some advanced placement courses, marketing, computer-aided drafting, journalism, business law, psychology and the like. One history teacher’s assignment had to change to strictly core classes just so every student could complete school requirements for graduation.

There are two solutions, more teachers and more space. According to principal Mrs. Nuzzo-Mueller, the first thing that would ease the scheduling conflict would be to “hire seven faculty members and find rooms for them to teach in.” In doing this the school would be able to open multiple sections of the same courses which would provide more scheduling options. It would make it possible to have more sections for high demand classes like art, music, journalism, and visual media.

New teachers would mean finding new rooms inside the building. According to Mrs. Nuzzo-Mueller there are several options. The school is home to four tenants. The town would have to find different housing for at least one of these tenants. One of the ideas that have been raised before has been the plan to build a town community center that could house a senior center as well as the early childhood center. This would then benefit both the seniors and the young families of Scituate.

Yet, when it comes down to it, money matters and so does space. Mrs. Nuzzo-Mueller estimates that seven teachers would cost around $45,000 each, which is a grand total of $315,000 per year which doesn’t include the amount of money it would cost to reconfigure the classrooms.”
Kelcie spoke at the Joint PTO/School Council meeting on December 4th. The summary of this meeting is included on the school website and the CSI: Scituate blog. Kelcie applauded the teachers for all that they do, calling them ‘troopers’. She said they, and others, do the best they can with what they have, which is symbolic of who we are. She summed up by saying that students should use their voices to propose solutions and help do something about it.