Any momentum to lobby the state to make health a 1/2 year again?

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03/18/2023 14:29

Subject: Any momentum to lobby the state to make health a 1/2 year again?

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Anonymous wrote:After 3 years of MS health ed plus 1/2 a year, what on earth are they discussing? Every year MS health ed is the same thing.

From what I could tell, Montgomery County health was about sex-ed, drugs, and a little bit of mental health.

When I went to school elsewhere, our health class covered sex-ed and drugs, but it also covered nutrition, body systems, diseases, and first aid (including the Heimlich and CPR certification). Admittedly, there wasn’t much focus on mental health.

If the extra semester of health means they actually learn more about health than safe sex, avoiding drugs, and mental health issues, it sounds like it would be beneficial.

So, you don't have kids in MCPS and know nothing about it but advocate for it. They did all those things in MS. Then, they do them all in the one semester of HS. Now, doing something like financial literacy makes sense. Another health education doesn't. Every semester its the same thing. Enough with the mental health non-sense. Talking about it in general terms isn't helping anyone. Parents need to step up and help and get their kids help with true mental health issues. Between student support/advisory and health ed, so much time is wasted repeating the same information vs. giving our kids a good well rounded education.

Pp you quoted
My kids are recent graduates of MCPS. One of them even took “Honors Health” as she was interested in a health career and was hoping for a more rigorous health class, which she didn’t get. You seem to be agreeing with me that the repeated semesters of health focusing on mental health is insufficient. That’s why they need a semester with useful content.

I agree that MCPS wastes a lot of time on fluffy topics when instructional time would be better served focusing on academic content and/or development of specific skills. I think instruction on financial literacy is also a good idea. It could be folded into existing math/economics classes (although with the current problems with math instruction, I hate to divert time/focus from main topics) or stand alone. Maybe we should just have a life skills class that includes financial literacy, practical health, and other miscellaneous general information that people need in life but usually just fumble through by themselves.

Everyone takes honors health. There is no on-level option.

This is not true (or maybe only at some schools)

Only Honors Health is listed in the HS course bulletin

http://coursebulletin.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/CourseLists/Index/225/#Health_Courses

It would be great if they'd also add new requirements for Honors Home Ec and Honors Checkbook Balancing .

First lesson would have to be: “This is what a checkbook looks like.”

Yes let’s get rid of what little flexibility kids have right now in their schedule. Let’s add a full year class on car and house repairs. How about another full year class in public speaking? Or a semester of keyboarding?

I mean we wouldn’t want kids to have the ability to take classes to figure out their potential college major like CS, Law, Medicine or have time to enrich themselves with additional Arts classes.

There's a significant portion of kids, not sure the exact percentage, that leave high school right now without figuring their potential college major, so it's not like the status quo is helping them figure that out. Undoubtedly, those students would be better off leaving high school knowing how to give a presentation or speech and typing and using professional computer applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Typing should be done in elementary school. And same with those other programs but kids can figure them out as they use google docs, slides, etc. for everything. Waiting till high school to do keyboarding is lame. As a parent, we spent a summer doing it to make sure our kids could.