A number of new classes were approved for Fountain Hills High School during the Dec. 14 School Board meeting, including Live Theatre Performance and Production, AP Environmental Science, Statistics, AP Statistics, AVID and a collection of AP Capstone courses (see related story).

Following approval, the Theatre class will be available this coming spring, with all other set to be available at the start of the 2017-18 academic year.

A partnership with the Fountain Hills Community Theater, the Live theatre Performance and Production courses will provide students with an opportunity to earn fine arts credits in a unique new way. A certified teacher will be provided by the Fountain Hills Theater, and classes will initially be taught at the Theater itself. Like many fine art and lab classes, this is a fee-based course.

With the statistics and environmental science courses helping round out the school’s departmental offerings, AVID is something of a unique program.

AVID stands for Achievement Via Individual Determination, and it is seen as a course that takes achieving students and pushes them to do even more.

The AVID program builds additional support and tutoring into the school day with the goal of building all students toward college readiness.

AzMERIT Math

Joining these courses as a discussion item for the night, the Board took a first look at a proposed AzMERIT Math class for FHHS.

This course is designed to meet the needs of students entering high school who have not yet passed the AzMERIT math exam. It’s planned as an elective course primarily for freshmen who earned a score of 1 on the standardized test, or by teacher recommendation.

Principal Cain Jagodzinski explained that this was another course aimed at “filling in the gaps, providing a year of math fundamentals before the student moves on to Algebra.”

This course will be considered for approval during a future meeting.