Revisions to the high school program of studies under curriculum and building on the agenda were discussed at the Dec. 3 Northwestern Lehigh School Board meeting.

High School Principal Aileen Yadush began the discussion.

“Some years, we have really nothing to talk about, but today there’s eight pages so if you’ll just bear with me for a little while. We do have some significant changes to our program of studies in certain curricular areas,” she said.

The first course she discussed was changing the Introduction to 2-D and Introduction to 3-D (Sculpture) to Introduction to World Art.

“Miss [Brooke] Seiler essentially took all of the content and objectives for high school art and created some courses where she could combine some skills and offer up some new opportunities for our students. That is the first change that we’ve made,” Yadush said.

“We offer four studio level classes. Those were level two and three classes in different areas in our art department. What Miss Seiler has done is she has eliminated all four of those studio courses to create one studio art class. That is what we will be adding to the program of studies book for next year. This will allow her to spend a little more time working with her advanced students.”s

Yadush said that more students are reaching those upper-level classes and Seiler feels this physically better serves the needs of students who enjoy art as a hobby and for students who need a portfolio moving on to post-secondary school.

She said the interesting thing about this new class is that students can take this course as many times as they would like.

“We just want to make sure that kids get recognized for that on their transcript without having to add another course number. We’re still working on that, but we are allowing students to take this course multiple times,” Yadush said.

The last two changes in art she discussed were changes to the course descriptions for Intro to Drawing and Painting and Intro to Ceramics and Crafts.

Next, she discussed the family and consumer science curriculum.

“Shay Dorney has been working with our Fundamentals of Early Childhood Education classes over the last two years to bring back the visits to the elementary school,” Yadush said. The visits were stopped after COVID.

“This year she actually did observations of the kids similar to what a teacher [would do] when she goes down to the elementary school, but she really felt strongly that she wanted to expand that opportunity for a course like this beyond students who wanted to go into education. She wanted to widen that pool, so we spent a lot of time with many folks throughout the building and renamed the course. So, the new name of this course is going to be Training and Teaching for Any Career.“

She said the kids actually picked the title.

“Basically, we want to offer this course to any student regardless of what career they choose. If you have interest in becoming a leader in whatever it is you do now or post-secondary, this would be a course for you.

“We feel very strongly about our relationship with Northwestern Elementary and the teachers and students there, so we are going to maintain that relationship with some form of internship or apprenticeship with the people at Northwestern Elementary,” Yadush said.

The next two courses reviewed were Food Preparation and Interior Design.

Yadush said by far, the food prep course is one of the most popular courses for a lot of reasons.

“They do amazing things in there beyond just baking chocolate chip cookies. They make some gourmet meals I’ve never made in my life. So, they do a wonderful job in there,” she said.

“Our Interior Design course is very math based and yet a creative and artistic class. Shay Dorney just updated these course descriptions for this year’s program of studies.”

During the discussion, Willard Dellicker asked Yadush if Training and Teaching for Any Career was unique to Northwestern.

“Yes, it is,” she responded. “Shay Dorney created it on her own. She really had been wanting to do something like this with an education class. We really talked about it and about the pool of students that we might be able to bring into a class like this.”

She added that Dorney wants to create electives for as many kids as possible regardless of what they’re moving on to.

“That was a very strong belief of hers,” Yadush explained. “We wanted to allow more kids than just future educators to be in the class. She spent a lot of time taking her ideas putting them into AI actually and that’s kind of how she worked her process of getting herself to this particular course description and the titles,” Yadush said.

The third item on the list are brand new courses being created for the high school.

“They are actually based upon a new law from PDE that requires every student beginning in 2026-27 to graduate having had a personal financial literacy course under their belt,” she said. “So, a couple of things that I had to change here were the graduation requirements - both from the state and from our district.

“We did add personal finance as a requirement, and I do want to recognize that this is for the class of 2026-27. The two courses that will meet the criteria that have been put forward from the state are 503 Personal Finance and 397 Financial Mathematics.”

She added the requirements are not easy because anytime you require every student to take a class, you have to meet every student’s individual schedule.

“Because of that,we actually have to identify two courses that will meet this requirement. The first one is for the majority of our students. This is going to be offered in grade 12.

“We felt very strongly that if we wanted this to truly be meaningful, we wanted to hit the kids close to the end of their high school career as possible,” Yadush said. “We’re trying to get them as close as we can to their adult life before offering this course. This course is actually going to be taught for our business, technology and FCS classes.”

She said the staff is working to create this as a hybrid course and as a course that runs like a college class, two to three days a week with the other two to three days when the student doesn’t have to attend class.

“Our ultimate goal with that course would be to create an online course that we can also offer to students who can work independently,” Yadush said.

The final item she discussed was a follow-up to how multipliers for calculating GPA’s had been developed and the language that will now be included in the 2026-27 program of studies.

The first two she discussed was how academic courses were weighted.

“While this is new language that’s written in the program of studies, it’s not a change. For accelerated and honors [courses], we do have to split it up into two groups, and we will have to do that for the next four years because, as you remember, we’re grandfathering. We’re rolling this out with next year’s freshman [class], so everything that is new will be for the class of 2030 and beyond,” Yadush said.

“For 10th, 11th and 12th grade next year, we will still add the three percentage points. The difference is we are going to do that internally as an administrative team and teachers will no longer do that.”

She said her secretary is going to be in charge of that task, and she will add the three percentage points to everyone’s final grade for the next two to three years until everyone is in the new multiplier for the year 2029-2030.

Yadush said families will be notified of these new changes when their child schedules an appointment with their counselor and the changes will be posted online sometime the first part of next year.

After further discussion, the board approved the revisions of the high school programs of studies.

Prior to the regular meeting the school board held its reorganization meeting.

During the reorganization, Todd Hernandez, Rebecca Hite, Lauren Hunsicker and Jennifer L. Senavaitis were sworn in by Magisterial District Judge Tom Creighton. The four were winners of the Nov. 4 general election in Lehigh County.

Hernandez was also reelected as president of the board, and Todd Leiser was reelected as vice president during the reorganization meeting.