Cheney Alternative School to offer core classes

The Cheney School District board has approved changes to the district’s alternative high school.

It will remove the “alternative” label and rename the school “Three Springs High School,” which refers to nearby Willow Springs, Depot Springs and Garden Springs.

“We looked at a lot of different names, and we made a recommendation to the school board,” said Allen Skoog, school administrator.

“It’s a state high school, just like Cheney High School or West Valley, but if you ask some of the students what ‘alternative’ means, they think it means less than.

“It’s got a negative connotation to it for a lot of kids and for a lot of adults. They don’t understand that it’s a high school diploma just like any other high school diploma,” Skoog said.

The school has an enrollment of about 60, ages 14 to 21.

“We’ve got students working on their GEDs; we’ve got students doing a re-entry program through (the educational service district),” Skoog said. “We’ve got a wide variety of students from all ability levels and all walks of life.”

The district also is creating a system of core classes, which lets students spend more time at school.

Skoog said that the school currently offers contract-based education, in which students attend one hour per week and work on one class at a time. This works out well for some of the students who are working full time or may have parenting responsibilities.

Along with the one hour of classroom instruction, students also have 25 hours of homework each week.

Skoog said several students were staying at the school to work on computers, and the current program wasn’t meeting those students’ needs.

“We’ve spent much of this year looking at other alternative programs, trying to devise something that will work for our student body. We’ve come up with a system that’s going to have core classes and also contract-based education,” Skoog said.

Under the new system, students will spend one day, rather than one hour each week at school.

“We think it’s going to help with our attendance problems we have with some students, and we’ll be better able to provide food service to them,” Skoog said.

Skoog said that no extra funds or staff will be needed to make these changes, which take effect in the fall.