Nashville Community High School Board Approves Courses And Fees For Next School Year

By Alex Haglund

There are new classes that have been planned for the next school year, Superintendent Thomas Hawkins told the Nashville Community High School Board at their regular January meeting, held on Monday, January 22.
The two new classes presented to the board were Athletic Physical Education and Workplace Communications.
Athletic PE will give student athletes a structured class which will give them goals and progression for strength and flexibility training, and will utilize a software program called Volt, for the students to track their progress.
Initially, the Athletic PE course will only be open to student athletes, and coaches believe that there will be enough interest for the class from just that population. If there is space after the initial offering though, it will be opened up to the general student population.
There was a fee change approved by the board related to this course too – there will be a $20 fee, to pay for the license to utilize the Volt software.
The other course, Workplace Communication, is a course formulated by the English Department. The course will cover a range of English and writing-related job skills, like resume and cover letter writing and transcripts.
Other job related skills that the teachers are planning to have the class cover include interviews, telephone conduct and conflict resolution. Ethics will be discussed as well, including digital citizenship and workplace ethics. All Senior-level English courses are planned to have a connection to the Holocaust as well, and in Workplace Communications, that connection will be framed around workplace ethics.
Michele Goostree, who helped to formulate the class along with Mrs. Robinson, Kollbaum and Olsen, was present at the the meeting and stated that one of the reasons that they were planning on incorporating Holocaust lessons in a seemingly unrelated class was so that students who might be on a career, rather than college track, can still cover the Holocaust with the other seniors. There was some concern that students that could benefit from this course might not take it so that they could instead take one of the higher level English courses to cover that unit.
Along with the Athletic PE’s fee, other fee changes approved for next year by the board included World Literature’s fee dropping from $11 down to $8. The fee for English I will go up from $8 to $18, in order to help purchase new copies of “the Miracle Worker” for the class. Anatomy and Physiology’s fee will go up from $16 to $20 – to help pay for a field trip to the cadaver lab in St. Louis.

Sicknesses, School Cancellations

The flu, colds and other illnesses have not left NCHS unscathed this season, Hawkins told board members.
Driving the point home as much as the figures in reports given by Hawkins, was the fact that Hawkins was giving the treasurer’s report on behalf of District Bookkeeper Stephanie Bauza, who was home taking care of a sick child, and was also giving the board the report on behalf of Principal Mark Begando, who had left the building earlier that day, with Hawkins saying that he was worried Begando had taken ill as well.
On one day, Hawkins said, 40 students were out sick at NCHS, or around 10-percent of the school. Despite that large number though, Hawkins said that it would take significantly more absences than that before sickness would force them to cancel school.
Other than huddling in one’s home or just letting a cold or flu run its course, the best thing that can be done to mititgate the impact of illness is to be proactive about prevention, and there, “I’m really going to hand it to the staff,” Hawkins said, “they’re really going after it.”
Hawkins stated that the teachers were keeping an eye on students, reminding them about handwashing and sanitizing, and having them just avoid the water fountains altogether right now.
Hawkins also spoke about weather-related school closings, expressing gratitude for all the people who helped in making the call regarding whether or not to close the school. Among those that he said helped to give him all the necessary facts when deciding whether to cancel school or not were Begando, Sean Cook, Greg Schmale, and Mike Brink.
As far as whether to call school off when weather is questionable, Hawkins said that his philosophy was, “I would much rather have a rain day (when the snow or sleet ends up being just rain), than to have school in on a day when we shouldn’t.”