In response to both community interest and educational goals, the School has added a new health education course to its curriculum. The class will serve as an alternative to Humans Systems Biology (HSB), offering students more flexibility in fulfilling their health graduation requirement while broadening the ways they can engage with concepts of wellness.
The addition of the health course was driven by several factors, including the transition of Humans Systems Biology teacher, Dr. Pierman into her new role focused on technology integration. While Dr. Pierman will still teach, she will be taking on fewer classes as she works more closely with faculty on implementing consistent and up-to-date tech practices in the classroom. “A lot of the reason behind the class was Dr. Pierman. We wanted to give her more time to explore her tech innovation role as she just earned her doctorate in technology integration. Dr. Pierman is pretty irreplaceable, so rather than trying to have someone else teach some of the HSB sections, we saw an opportunity to create a new offering that meets the health requirement in a different way,” said Upper School Academic Dean Mr. Curtis.
In addition to better utilizing Dr. Pierman’s time, the course was also designed to address feedback from students who found HSB academically intense or outside of their interests. “Some of the passion and motiva- tion for starting the course was defi- nitely community demands. Some kids found HSB to be a challenging course and because we are requiring all students to have a health requirement, we wanted to have different levels of challenge and rigor for the course. HSB was one where we stu- dents not only needed a biology prerequisite, but really had to make sure they met a certain academic standard. We wanted to make sure that there were options for students that maybe don’t have that same passion for anatomy and physiology,” Mr. Curtis explained.
Unlike HSB, which concentrates on anatomy, physiology, and dissection labs, the health course will focus on broader aspects of wellness: mental, emotional, and physical. Students will study nutrition, disease prevention, stress management, healthy relationships, and decision making, using scientific evidence to understand the factors that contribute to a healthy lifestyle.
Although the course was a late addition to next year’s offerings, the administration believes it is a timely and necessary addition. “Getting students more information about themselves and how their bodies are working and also how decisions are made not just individually but collectively should help them learn to self-regulate and to be more students going forward because this will arm them with better evidence for making choices,” Mr. Curtis explained.
Still, implementing a new course comes with its own set of logistical hurdles. “Implementing new courses can be hard because any change is hard, but we are responsible and flexible to student needs. The idea is that we are going to have new staff coming in to fill in some of these roles and also developing curriculum. Some of these topics can cause some controversy and difference in opinion so we are trying to figure out how to teach a course that is grounded in science but also has a lot of social and personal investment in what these topics mean. Our plan is to base them on the Florida State standards but still make it a Benjamin course,” Mr. Curtis shared.
The course will not count toward the 3.5 lab science credit requirement and will not fulfill the prerequisite for Honors Human Anatomy. Additionally, HSB will carry an honors distinction that will also be applied retroactively to Upper School students who have already completed the course.
Curriculum changes can raise questions about how colleges will perceive student choices, however Director of College Counseling, Mrs. Wright emphasizes that while the course is less academically rigorous than HSB, it offers students more flexibility to align their schedules with their interests and strengths. “For students who are not interested in science and anatomy, I think that this new health class will allow them to spend more time on their other classes. And for the kids that are truly interested in science, they now have the opportunity to differentiate themselves by taking HSB and show that additional interest. As far as the transcript goes, the new health class will just show up as any other regular class and will most likely be perceived as a light, elective, requirement-based class. I don’t think that students who take the health class versus HSB will be hurt in the college admissions process because I really think colleges are just going to think of it as a requirement students have to fill,” Mrs. Wright shared.
The new health course will launch in the 2025-2026 school year. While details are still being finalized, the course is intended to provide an alternative that allows the schools to utilize faculty expertise more effectively and tend to student requests.
