Joe Green on combining courses through school consolidation
School District of Greenwood Administrator Joe Green describes efforts to work with the School District of Loyal to combine courses and offer more learning options as part of consolidation efforts.
By Frederica Freyberg | Here & Now
September 17, 2025 • West Central Region
Joe Green on efforts to offer more learning options as part of school consolidation.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Joe Green:
I'll say some of the opportunities are going to be in our courses when we have small class sizes. So, when you start looking at combining some populations, you're giving kids more opportunities to compete and work with students of like needs, where sometimes we have singletons that need certain needs, or even some of the higher-level learning can be challenging to provide for some students. But now when you mix a couple groups together, you're sharing some of those needs. There's going to be opportunities in say, tech ed, between Loyal and Greenwood. We have two tech ed programs that we offer very similar courses with small numbers of kids in classes, you know, some of the classes. So when you put two programs together, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to reduce staff. What it hopefully can mean is that we are able to offer more opportunities, because we no longer have to — we have one teacher maybe teach welding for all of the kids. And that opens up time slots for another tech ed teacher to teach different things, whether it's robotics or mechanics or anything like that. So, and the same thing for some of the general curriculum. Right now — Mr. Lindner said something a little bit ago about — some of the classes where we share right now. I've always used things like trigonometry or calculus or advanced placement classes where we both have a class with two, three, four kids in it, and we are using a teacher for that class. Well, to combine, we would only need one teacher to teach that class, thus opening the opportunity for the other teacher to add something new or add something that we know that our students could benefit from. So, there's ways in that perspective, in that light, to create more learning opportunities for our kids.
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