The upcoming 2022-2023 school year has a few new opportunities for students. There will be a new course offered called Multiple Perspectives in Literature and new changes to College Credit Plus.

Multiple Perspectives in Literature

There will be a new diversity course offered at Hayes starting next year called Multiple Perspectives.
“The goal of the course is to read and discuss great young adult literature, picture books and articles that have a lot of diversity and perspectives that they’re written from and about,” said Hayes librarian Sarah Ressler, who will be teaching Multiple Perspectives.
Students will be able to read or listen to the audiobook of whichever book they choose. They will be able to read eight or more different perspectives throughout the semester.
“We are going to start with African American and Black perspectives,” Ressler said. “We are going to do LGBTQIA+ perspectives…we are looking at disabilities and we will also have a lot of women’s perspectives because they are often underrepresented.”
Multiple Perspectives will be offered to juniors and seniors as a semester-long class. It will also be a hybrid class with the students meeting two to three days a week. The “off” days will be used to read the books and write in the online discussion posts.
The students will be graded on their contributions to the discussion posts. There will also be an end of the course project that students will complete, reflecting what they have read and learned throughout the course.
“We are going to compile our creative, thoughtful responses and reflections into a small project,” Ressler said.
Ressler has led the Social Justice Book Club at Hayes which will be what Multiple Perspectives is like but will provide students more opportunities for discussion, as well as the ability to earn credit.
“I’m really hoping that the class itself is taken by the diversity of Hayes High School,” Ressler said.

College Credit Plus

There will be a few changes and new opportunities with College Credit Plus for the upcoming school year.
“We always have the Marion Tech block,” college and career counselor Jennifer Pollard said. “The first semester we have Sociology and English Comp One…we are going to be adding Oral Communications, which is the speech class. Those will be the three classes for the first semester and the second semester remains the same.”
An Intro into Engineering course will also now be offered through CCP with students receiving their Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) certification.
The eligibility rules for CCP are being revised as well for the 2022-2023 school year. They have made a proposal for the new requirements.
“The proposal is if you have a 3.0 GPA, [you will be] automatically admitted. If you have less than a 3.0 GPA, but let’s say you wanted to take a comp one class well, if we looked at all of your grades in all of your high school English and you had A’s and B’s, they would let you take an English course,” Pollard said. “If you don’t meet any of those other criteria, you can take placement tests…There are four different assessments that you could take to try to qualify.”
There will also be a new mature content rule put into place for CCP, which parents will have to sign. This new rule is put into place because the coursework and topics will not be changed for high school students.
Students are able to apply for CCP now and will have to fill out an intent to participate form, due April 1.
“Even if you are like, ‘No, I do not think I’m going to participate,’ I always encourage people to turn that in,” Pollard said. “If you are taking multiple APs, they’re probably going to conflict with something that you want to take, so CCP is a great alternative in order to get everything that you want to take because it’s a little bit more flexible.”