Many students are taking online courses, and the school district wants to offer more classes to meet the demands. Principal Robert Bach and staff are discussing how to execute this over the summer. They want to make sure they propose classes and create a strong online program while ensuring online students are successful.

Every year, more students are taking online classes as an alternative learning route. To maintain balance and satisfaction, the district wants to increase the amount of classes in quantity and diversity. Offering students more class opportunities will have many impacts. This can make students learn specific classes for their education requirements and future. In short, to satisfy and maintain the number of online students, more online classes will be created.

Principal Robert Bach explained why the classes are being created. Bach said that more students are taking online classes every year, and he wants to discuss that with other staff. Bach wanted to make sure that “if there are more and more students opting for online, then we should be figuring out how to create that.”

“The reason is because more and more students are choosing online. And so since they’re choosing online, you know, as you look at what the needs and what the desires of students, we need to continue to evolve to meet those needs,” Bach added.

Online classes have many strengths and flaws. Students have much more flexibility and time management to do their classes. Since they take online classes, they can do classes whenever they want to. Some online students can get work done faster through online courses too. However, online classes may not work well if students are having trouble accessing technology for whatever reason. In online classes, asking for and receiving help from teachers or professors may be difficult without any calls such as Zoom. Emails or any kind of messaging can take a lot of time. More online classes may not benefit students who lack self-discipline; online classes take self-discipline to excel, and people doing the opposite of that will do poorly in online classes.

Counselor Dan Ralston explained his thoughts on how more online classes can affect students and staff. He said that it would increase class diversity for online classes and offer more choices. Ralston believed that more online classes would offer “additional flexibility for students in their day if they are taking some online asynchronous courses.”

“I think the pros for students is independent learning and flexibility, period. The con is that we are a school community, and we can’t be a community if we don’t have all of our members here. So having students that are choosing to leave Stillwater to take online is detrimental to our school community and the organization in which we kind of function,” Ralston said.

Students may think it is great, bad or neutral. It can be great because more online classes for students grant more choices to do certain classes. It can be bad because some students believe that more online classes would not do anything, or students are neutral toward this idea.

Junior Huseng Xiong emphasized his thoughts about more online classes for students. He said “It’s a good thing” because more online classes meant more freedom. He explained his beliefs that more online classes will be great since it will do well for students who have a healthy time management.

“I think it’s a good because it allows for more flexibility for students. And based on what my online teacher said on my freshman year, they actually prefer teaching online than in person because it allowed them to create their schedule without worrying about work,” Xiong said.

Many students are taking online classes as an alternative way to learn education. To balance that, the school district is increasing the amount of online classes in the fall of 2026. Staff are still discussing how to make online classes be efficient as possible while also circumventing specific flaws such as students cheating using ChatGPT. In short, more students are taking online classes, more online classes are being added as a response and the district wants to satisfy the needs for all.