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Haris Hadzialijagic

Mr. Gardner

4 February 2022

BHS Predicament

Dear Brighton High School Administration,

These past couple of years have been one giant mess to lay it out directly. It was already

hard enough having to manage between school, work, and personal life, but the emergence of a

global pandemic did not make things any easier. Throughout this experience students lost the

most important thing to their education: learning skills and knowledge that will be useful in the

future as they transition into adulthood. Instead of learning material they just went through

courses as fast as they could in order to get the credit. Many students failed their courses and are

currently struggling to make up for the lost time. The current curriculum has set students up for

failure as it has not provided the necessary classroom environment that is adaptable to these new

changes and to prepare them for the real world outside the classroom.

There are so many people that graduate high school not knowing what to do next and do

not know how to be independent from their parents. It is crucial to teach necessary life skills to

students in high school as they transition into the next phase of their lives. This is a valuable

topic that needs to be addressed as more and more students are entering into adulthood without

knowing how to do simple tasks as opening up a bank account or knowing how to manage and

pay their bills. It is a path that has a great potential to motivate students and prepare them to

build a better future than previous generations have had. In order to fix this issue the school

curriculum needs to be improved through a three-part plan.

The first part of the plan is to bring awareness to the issue itself to Brighton High School

faculty members through the use of a google forms survey sent out through email. This will be
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created and sent out by the administration. According to a survey taken by BHS community

members, 87% believe that there should be a new curriculum implemented in order to teach

useful topics to students rather than just busy work (Hadzialijagic).

The second part of the plan is for the administration to hold a set of meetings with the

faculty members of BHS and the district to inform them of the new curriculum plan and how it

will function. The meetings and training for teachers will be conducted throughout April-July

2022. Students cannot learn so much information within one year of high school so it is

important to spread out the information into several courses within the four years of high school

which leads to the final part of the plan which is to implement the adapted curriculum starting at

the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year.

The adapted curriculum will include the current core courses of Math, Science, Language

Arts, History, and Physical Health along with the following new courses: Professional/Job skills,

Finances/Financial Literacy, Post-Secondary Education Preparedness , Self Determination/Self-

Management, Independent Living, Transportation and Community Access, Employability Skills,

and Health and Wellness. The courses will be part of a new system of required credits for

graduation that will replace courses that students have no use for through a hands-on experience.

These courses and the skills that would be taught within them were chosen after a thorough

conduction of personal interviews of a student and a teacher at Brighton High School (Johnson,

Preston, Stephanie Isley) which provided inside information on what the students are missing out

on and what teachers believe the solution to this is. “Life is a series of decisions…[and] every

choice we make can have a potentially life-changing effect. It’s important for students to learn

how to make confident and well-informed decisions” (Positive Action Staff) and the best way to

teach them how to make these decisions is by empowering them through knowledge.
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Works Cited

Hadzialijagic, Haris. “BHS School Improvement Project.” Google Forms Survey, Google, 7 Jan.

2022,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdeB4Z4aFPlV9bYYj772A3e1T4cCG

P_CrpCXtRK1ZTeriEQQ/viewform.

Johnson, Preston, Stephanie Isley. Interview. 25 January 2022.

Positive Action Staff. “Why Should We Be Teaching Life Skills in Schools in 2021?”

Www.positiveaction.net, 28 Jan. 2021,

www.positiveaction.net/blog/teaching-life-skillsin-schools. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.