EATON — Eaton High School students will be seeing an increase in new electives in the school handbook for next school year.

During the Eaton Community Schools Board of Education meeting on Monday, Jan. 14, high school principal Scott Couch presented the updates. These changes will be approved during the February board meeting.

“The big change that we are looking at in our elective courses are in the technology department. Currently, freshmen take a semester of Applied Technology for a half credit. In that course, they look at key terms, Word, Excel, Power Point, create newsletters, and look at cyber safety,” Couch said.

“Our sophomore students take a Technology Foundations and Ethics course, where they look at using the internet to make webpages, talking about plagiarism and copy right information.”

He added, an administrative team met in the fall to talk about technology offerings and to increase the level of difficulty and range of courses, as students are learning more about technology at younger ages.

Students will still earn a total of one credit in technology, but there are different pathways for them to earn that credit. The following courses will be offered: Sports and Entertainment Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Microsoft Office, Video Creation/Website, Intro to Coding/Robots/Drones, Intro to Hardware/Computer Repair, and Advanced Hardware.

Applied Technology and Technology Foundations and Ethics will still be offered.

“It gives kids options and hopefully we can build off of the experiences they have had in technology at the middle school in Mr. Niehuas’ class, at Bruce, and at East. It is starting sooner and sooner. Working with my kids, they are creating Power Points in elementary school and it seemed redundant for us to review those same topics,” Couch said.

Board member Darrell Durham expressed his concern over history courses, to which Superintendent Jeff Parker responded, U.S. and World Studies is being offered in the school for freshmen and sophomore.

For Superintendent Parker, these new electives are an important step to make Eaton Community Schools competitive with Miami Valley Career Technical Center (MVCTC).

“Two of my four children graduated from CTC and I think it is an excellent education option. I think our job is to make it an extremely tough choice for kids when they’re sophomores for what they want to do by making positive options here. I feel this is a step toward that,” Parker said.