The 2025-26 school year brought many academic changes to various courses and curricula, especially within the Social Studies department. These changes involved renaming courses that already exist, changes to weighting, as well as graduation requirement updates. However, a beloved course at SBHS that was subject to many changes was the Kids, Kids, Kids program, alternatively, the Kids in the 21st Century course.
Starting with this school year, the program is no longer offered, with other courses pertaining to that field taking its place. The Honors Field Experience in Education, for example, will be a semester-long course, offered in both the Fall and the Spring, but will require experience in one of the child development courses. It will be a senior-only capstone-like class, where seniors interested in pursuing elementary education will get a chance to interact with elementary-schoolers and student-teach throughout the district’s elementary schools.
In an interview, Mrs. Meryl Orlando, the former Family and Consumer Sciences teacher, said, “I think that without having the opportunity to be in the preschool lab, students will not be as interested in taking the child psychology and human behavior courses. I believe that it will lessen the amount of people that, first of all, go into teaching. See, this is a teaching cluster here.”
Mrs. Orlando also said, “If they take child psychology, human behavior, that will be great, because you have to take that in college if you’re going to teach. It will hurt the amount of students that we bring along and send out to the world to be teachers.”
The Little Vikings Playschool was turned into a state-sanctioned preschool within the high school, completely separate from the SBHS Kids program. The high school only provides the space for the preschool, but is otherwise uninvolved.
Mrs. Orlando added, “A preschool teacher will be hired by the district, and if I were to stay, I could have been one of those teachers because I’m certified, both pre-school and high school. “
Unlike Kids, Kids, Kids, the newer classes do not involve interacting with kids, and focus more on learning about the actual developmental science in children and their behaviors. The revamping of the Kids, Kids, Kids program is bittersweet, but will ultimately bring on different opportunities for students with an interest in careers related to working with children.
