This year, the language department at Lawrence High School faced more cuts; this time in the German program.
Stephen Arbeau, who taught the German classes for a year and half, recently said goodbye to LHS students as he transitioned to a new teaching job in the Lee Summit district.
After the loss of previous German teacher Arne Scholz in 2022, the position was filled by a long-term substitute, as the school struggled to find a qualified replacement due to complexities in the licensing process.
School administrators were informed last year that budget cuts in the district would lead to the loss of 2-3 teaching positions at LHS for the 2024-2025 school year. The original plan was not to fill the positions of resigning teachers in the ESOL, social studies, and math departments, but it pivoted to making cuts in language classes instead.
According to Carolyn McKenna, Spanish teacher and head of the language department at LHS, cutting German classes was unfortunate, but necessary.
“When given the choice between holding a German position to likely be filled by a long-term sub again, and preserving a position in a core subject area where class sizes are extremely large anyway, I think the choice seemed pretty clear,” McKenna said. “While Mr. Arbeau was a great teacher and his German numbers were growing, the enrollment numbers of LHS at large were ultimately the problem.”
Although German students lost their teacher, they did not fully lose their class.
Proctored by band teacher Mike Jones, the students complete lessons digitally using an online program called Rosetta Stone. The transition to the new digital system has been rocky, leaving students such as senior Elijah Mann unable to use the program at this time.
“For German IV we still don’t have the complete program course lined out. It’s going to be a very self-paced course. It’s obviously not nearly as good as having a real teacher, so I’m not looking forward to that,” Mann said.
Some students, such as junior Magdalene Ortiz, were denied continuance of their German study.
“I really wanted to do German again although it was taken online, but when I went in to ask I was told I was not qualified to do it, which was very confusing because I had good grades,” Ortiz said.
Although Ortiz was not able to enroll in German class, she continues to learn outside of school. However, she worries that the cost of many independent study courses will dissuade her peers to continue learning on their own time.
“It is a little bit upsetting for the amount of people who are wanting to learn languages. . . there are so many different cultures and languages and so many people want to travel to other places,” Ortiz said. “So it is just upsetting that a lot of those people don’t have the money or time to take some of the independent courses, so being able to learn at school was very nice.”
Senior Orion Hamlin, who has taken German since freshman year, believes that learning German online makes it harder to fully understand the language.
“I think it makes it tougher to understand some of the reasoning behind the concepts that we’re learning,” Hamlin said. “Just because you can’t really ask how this connects to other parts of a language. You just have to trust that what it’s telling you is right.”
Unlike LHS, Free State was not required to make teacher cuts last year and did not receive cuts to their German classes, which some students found unfair.
“The fact that Free State gets to keep its German program and their teacher as well as other language classes, in my eyes is just a lack of equity within the district.” Mann said.
In 2019, Lawrence High offered Spanish, French, Chinese/Mandarin, Latin, and German. Today, only French and Spanish is offered, as well as the limited German program.
McKenna and other language teachers said they were sad to see multiple language classes go in such quick succession.
“As language teachers we are all very sad whenever our offerings get whittled down further,” McKenna said. “It is sad that we are able to only offer French and Spanish at this time. Plans for the German program beyond the Fall semester have not been communicated to me. I cannot imagine that the program will be restored to the previous format without some significant changes in school funding.”
Overall, Ortiz mainly missed the welcoming community that had been built in the German classroom.
“It was pretty devastating because we had built a community in that classroom,” Ortiz said. “Everybody was very comfortable and it was a place to go if you needed somebody.”
