The arts department plans to phase out semester-long arts elective classes and replace them with year-long classes starting with the 2025-26 school year. There will be no changes to the number of arts credits required (four semesters).
The Freshman Arts Experience will no longer be part of the core curriculum. Instead, Freshman Seminar will expand to a year-long class with added course material. Health and Wellness, Executive Functioning and Digital Citizenship are examples of new rotations, although details are still being finalized.
Upper School counselor Stefie Dominguez teaches Human Behavior, a class part of the current rotation, and is excited about the change. “Expanding the Freshman Seminar class will be really helpful and foundational to every freshman that comes to Menlo,” Dominguez said.
With the added length to the class, Dominguez feels the program will better address its mission of helping to establish school culture to the freshman class by ensuring all students begin seminar at the start of the year. “From the beginning, all of them, not just half, will get to experience discussing [with] peers and learning about school culture in these [classes],” Dominguez said.
Around the broader change, both the creative arts department and administration believe including more year-long arts classes will have a positive impact on students. Creative Arts Department Chair Leo Kitajima Geefay believes that semester-long arts classes actually provide students with fewer interesting options. “The school wanted more semester arts electives in the art program because they thought it might [make choosing classes] more nimble and allow students to pursue more subjects,” Kitajima Geefay said. “However, it created a bottleneck for upperclassmen, because multiple English or science classes were also singletons, so […] students would end up taking an arts [class] they didn’t originally want to take.”
One drawback of the new system is that many of next year’s seniors and juniors may only have one semester of the arts requirement to complete; however, they may need to fulfill that requirement with a year-long course.
Junior Hannah Bernthal is struggling to find an arts elective that fits with her academic schedule. “I find [this process] frustrating, because taking an arts elective could restrict me from taking year-long courses that I want to take in academic subjects,” Bernthal said.
Although she thinks the change will benefit incoming freshmen, the transition year will negatively impact upperclassmen in her view. “Making the rest of us adjust to the system when we didn’t have that system freshman year is unfair,” Bernthal said.
Although Kitajima Geefay agrees the transitional period will be a growing pain, he feels the process is necessary for furthering students’ mastery of disciplines. He believes year-long arts courses also allow students to attain mastery of an art form, not just basic knowledge. Kitajima Geefay compares the system to learning a world language at Menlo: “It would be very hard to adopt Mandarin in a semester, and then bounce to Latin and Spanish,” he said.
Community Engagement Coordinator Ava Petrash most often sees examples of this issue in the visual arts classes. According to her, first-year photography teacher Ryan Bowden found it hard to cover all the essential foundations of photography within a single semester.
Petrash additionally believes that an arts requirement at Menlo is valuable because when students actively engage in creative endeavors, they become more well-rounded and balanced young people with a wide array of interests. “[Arts are] a valuable use of [students’] time at a stage where people can become overly focused on academic work,” Petrash said.
