At its meeting on Monday, the East Aurora School District 131 school board approved two curriculum-related items that students at East Aurora High School will see when they return to class in the fall.
The first is a hybrid physical education course for 11th and 12th grade students that will take place during the school’s zero hour.
Zero hour at East Aurora High School is held from 8 a.m. to 8.45 a.m., with the first class period beginning at 8:52 a.m., per the district website.
The course will feature the same curriculum as other PE courses, East Aurora High School Principal Jennifer Mitchell said at a curriculum meeting in May, but will be offered during zero hour for the first time next year.
According to a presentation from the district explaining the course, the class will be called the “Tomcat Morning Prowl – Hybrid,” so as to differentiate it from other course names and ensure students understand what class and time they’re choosing.
The course will also be different in that it will function on a hybrid schedule, Mitchell said. Students will spend two days a week at the school for the course, but can choose their own workouts and complete them away from school the other days the class meets. They’ll be given heart rate monitors to track their activity, and will submit the data from their monitors to their teacher.
There will be no additional costs to take the zero-hour course, Mitchell said.
In addition to functioning as a traditional physical education class, part of the goal is to teach students “personal responsibility and accountability for their health and fitness,” Mitchell said, particularly as students prepare to graduate high school and transition away from structured PE classes and high school sports in favor of planning and doing their own workouts.
The other change coming to East Aurora is new materials to be used for Advanced Placement, or AP, and Heritage Spanish courses at the high school.
The materials being used currently date back to 2012, the district’s Executive Director of Language Acquisition and Early Learning Rita Guzman told school board members at the May 19 curriculum meeting. In a memo to district Superintendent Robert Halverson, Guzman noted that the district needs updated materials in order to comply with language development standards related to the four domains of language: listening, speaking, reading and writing. The new materials will be used by students in grades nine through 12.
The district implemented a pilot program to test out materials, Guzman said, and then collected teacher and student feedback. Based on that, they decided on materials from Vista Higher Learning for both courses.
These new materials will come at cost of $92,451 for the district, Guzman said.
Both updates were approved by the school board Monday, and are set to move forward for next school year.
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com
