AURORA | After enduring a wave of student criticism, administrators at Rangeview High School Thursday, Feb. 18, decided to draw back on a planned push to cut and move business classes and clubs offered at the school.
Rangeview will continue to offer a handful of business classes and host business-centric clubs such as Future Business Leaders of America and DECA next year, according to Patti Moon, APS spokeswoman. The classes will be catered to juniors and seniors.
“After listening to student concerns, Rangeview is still going to offer some business classes next year,” Moon said.
Controversy regarding the fate of the business program at Rangeview began swirling earlier this month, when Ron Fay, the principal at the school, sent out a memo alerting parents that Rangeview would be shuttering business classes and clubs offered at the school’s campus on East Iliff Avenue. The school had planned to rely on existing classes offered at the Community College of Aurora and Pickens Technical College, which is operated by APS and several other state entities, to satisfy the desires of students interested in taking business courses.
But student pushback regarding the travel time needed to get to CCA and Pickens, as well as an overall lack of transportation options available to underclassmen, caused the school to reconsider.
However, the decision to retain business classes at Rangeview is not indefinite. The school will continue to phase out the program after students, who are currently in business classes, have graduated, according to information outlined by Fay in a talk he gave to FBLA and DECA students on Thursday. After current business students are done at Rangeview, Fay will reevaluate the vitality of clubs like FBLA by conducting freshman interest polls, according to Abel Negussie, a Rangeview sophomore who attended Fay’s talk.
“For the next two years, they’ll keep offering business classes,” Negussie said. “And from there, they’ll downgrade the business program and make cuts. So, either the business program will come back, if there’s enough interest, or it will dissipate if there’s not.”
In the meantime, Rangeview will continue its efforts to bolster the school’s science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, program.
In his letter, which was sent to parents on Feb. 8, Fay referenced a need to strip resources from the business department and reallocate them to the STEM program in order for the latter to continue to grow.
“(Mr. Fay) is still looking to expand STEM,” Moon said.
While participation in business offerings at Rangeview has waned in recent years, the STEM department has grown from 27 students to more than 300 in the last five years, according to Moon.
Despite the decision to keep some business classes at Rangeview, the curricular shakeup is still troubling to students like Hailey Dearman, a senior at the school and president of its DECA chapter.
“I think that this is a start, but I am still not satisfied,” Dearman said in a Twitter message Thursday. “One of the biggest things that concerned me is that there would not be a business program for incoming students. I will not be happy until we have a business department for students of all grades, both existing and incoming. We need a permanent business department at the school so students continue to have the opportunity to participate and complete the business pathway. Allowing existing business students to ‘finish’ the business pathway does not solve the problem, but postpone(s) it.”