The Warren County R-III board of education approved changes to the course guide, including adding a Bible elective and eliminating French.
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The Warren County R-III Board of Education recently approved the district’s course guide for the 2024-2025 school year, which outlines changes at both the middle and high schools.
With the approval of the course guide, Black Hawk Middle School will switch from offering classes over seven periods to eight periods per day. The change is being made in part due to Physical Education minute requirements put in place by the state board. In order to make this happen, they needed to adjust their schedule, Warren County R-III Superintendent Dr. Gregg Klinginsmith said.
“The main goal of that was not to limit the number of electives students could have opportunities to,” Klinginsmith said. “We could have kept it the same. We could have kept it a seven period day, but we would have lost a semester of potential elective opportunities for kids. And that really is something we didn’t want to do. So moving to an eight period schedule allows us to maintain the same number of elective opportunities for kids.”
The middle school will also add career courses for students in sixth and eighth grades. The district already has career education in seventh grade, Klinginsmith said.
The course guide also outlines multiple changes for Warrenton High School. Among the changes for next school year are the addition of leadership development and Introduction to the Bible elective courses. The Introduction to the Bible elective class would be offered as a social studies credit.
“This is a course that was approved by the legislative session last session … We thought we would offer it to see what kind of interest we have and see where it goes,” Klinginsmith said. “We're allowed to offer this due to the law changes.”
The district will also discontinue offering an in person class option for French at the high school. While students will be able to take French class online, there was not the demand to offer it as an in person class.
“We just have not had the demand for a full French teacher of course and we struggled to find a teacher,” Klinginsmith said. “And so kids can still take French. We’re just not going to have a standalone program and course guide. They can do it virtually if they’d like just like any other language like German or things like that, that we don’t offer. But Spanish has just been such a high demand that’s taking really all our resources for that.”
