Push 2 to continue in Latin

When did we quit teaching Latin? But first things first. The school board will continue to accept letters of interest and resumes from parties interested in being considered for the vacant school board seat until August 8. Please submit them to the board office at 111 Academy Drive.
The board will conduct interviews of those interested at a special meeting on a date yet to be determined with the intent to appoint the new member at the August 18 board meeting.
Miss Reaping was a commanding figure in the hallways of my high school on the days she had all her students dressed in togas for some special event happening in Latin class. I was not among them.
There were two college bound “tracks” in those days. College Prep A (Arts/Academic, which included Latin) and College Prep C (Business/Commercial, no Latin). The “Trade” track included wood shop and metal working. The “Commercial” track included secretarial skills and basic accounting. And the “General” track was for those who sought a high school education with no further schooling in mind. They did not study algebra, geometry or foreign languages as I recall.
The decade old Watson-Crick DNA model discovery was still big news as I went off to college. Models of the double helix seemed to be everywhere. Today our seventh graders skim past those models and move on to more challenging material. The world has changed and with it, education.
In a few short years all students who receive a high school graduation diploma will have been taught Algebra I and II. They will have a more thorough grounding in the sciences than today and their course work will be more demanding overall.
The demands of testing to measure achievement force schools to focus on the tested areas at the expense of other academic pursuits. We can no longer afford the ‘luxuries’ of a more varied curriculum. While we still teach courses not subject to the testing requirements, they are falling by the wayside as demand for performance in the specified areas increases.
Put politically incorrectly, yet honestly, we have less to offer the Ivy League bound student and more to offer the state school bound student. As the Ivey Leaguers represent a smaller slice of the student body, this probably makes sense, but it still means a loss of options.
On the other side of the equation we have students at the high school level who struggle with reading, a basic skill that will impact the rest of their lives. If they did not get well grounded in the basics of reading skills in the early years of grade school, they will have problems ongoing as they study ever more challenging material. Yet we do not teach fundamental reading skills past the fifth grade level. Surely we can serve them better to prepare for the world ahead. Many of the challenges they face in other subject areas are related to their ability to read.
Mandates and funding issues severely limit and restrict the options available to local districts and boards but those are not reason to surrender our own desires and visions. It means we must be more creative, more aggressive. We cannot afford to wait for solutions from afar; the answers lie close at hand.
We can envision and create the educational future our children and we deserve. It begins with desire.
While the imposing visage of Miss Reaping is but a distant memory, she would have been pleased to hear on a modern answering machine, “ Push one to continue in Latin.”