Big Changes Coming to Cozad High School for 2016-2017

Big changes mean new opportunities are on the horizon for Cozad students in the 2016-2017 school year.  After nearly a year of planning, our current homeroom will be undergoing a major makeover to focus on three initiatives.  These three focuses are:

1.  Offering a more purposeful approach to helping our freshman grow the skills they need to be successful.  This will include character education, career education, study skills, digital citizenship, and academic planning.
2. Providing a framework for academic interventions for students who are struggling academically.  This will include opportunities for remediating missed content skills and for the recovery of credit for those who have fallen behind in their progress to graduate.
3. Increasing enrichment course offerings and real world learning opportunities.  These will range from increased college preparatory opportunities to exploratory classes that cover a wide variety of academic content areas.

In order to allow for these areas to be addressed through the this new "8th Period", the current homeroom, which is twenty four minutes long, will be expanded to forty eight minutes.  To accomplish this, our regular classes will be shortened from fifty one minutes to forty eight minutes each.  After discussions with teachers and administrators, all felt comfortable with the forty eight minute length of classes to still allow for an appropriate amount of instruction time.  

To ensure that the programming focuses are relevant to Cozad and our students needs, teachers have taken the lead in developing the direction and logistics of each of the focus.  Each of these focus areas has approximately six teachers who have chosen to help with that specific initiative.  This will allow teachers to have ownership of the programs they develop and students to benefit from the decisions of those who know them best.

  

Stay tuned this spring for more information.