Mr. Jefferey Jonas interview

Have you ever wondered if a larger school is superior to a smaller school? Mr.Jonas, a teacher at our school who previously taught at Freedom High School in California, is going to attempt to answer this question. There are many different and unique school across the country, but the main differences lye in one of the two categories; curriculum and students

Each school district can vary in many different ways with its curriculum. In the comparison of Searcy High School and Freedom High School there are two major differences in curriculum, schedule and difficulty. In Freedom High School the schedule differs excessively from our schedule. Instead of having all of the classes/class periods in one day they have 1-4 periods on one day and 5-8 on the next day. Mr Jonas, having taught in both environments, felt our school schedule is a more effective learning environment. Mr.Jonas explained, “I prefer the Searcy schedule over the modified schedule mainly because 90 minutes is a really, really long time for students to be in a classroom.” The second major difference is difficulty. Mr.Jonas also feels Freedom had a higher difficulty than Searcy. One example of the difficulty is 9th grade students take biology instead of physical science. Mr.Jonas elaborated, “We had AP biology, AP physics, AP french and spanish, AP art history. There were a lot of opportunities for students there.” 

The second category is students.  Mr.Jonas first mentioned, “Here, I would say, it seems like there is a lot less bad stuff going on.” He further explained what he meant by “bad stuff” later on. At Freedom there was a lot of drug use and more violence. Although this was expected from a larger school with a higher population, it was still surprising how much drug use Freedom had. “Some had gotten fentanyl. I don’t know if it was intentional or accidental but they overdosed from the drug,”  Mr.Jonas clarified. Along with their home life a lot of students spoke spanish and were at the poverty line. 

Based on what Mr.Jonas conveyed, Searcy is safer and has more distinguished behavior but Freedom has more academic opportunities. Searcy has less crime and students have a better attitude. Freedom has more AP classes and more advanced materials. Now there is a new question. Do students or curriculum make a school superior?