At the end of the 2024-2025 school year, Hellgate French students received an email from their sole French teacher, Katie Wyskiver, informing them that she would not be returning for the next academic year. This came as a shock to most, if not all, of her students, who spent the summer believing that there may not be a French class to return to for the 2025-2026 school year.
“I was looking into taking a French class through the University or online because I didn’t know that there would be French at Hellgate,” said senior Aiden Latrielle-Marsh.
This was simply due to a misunderstanding and miscommunication between students and staff, and according to Principal Judson Miller, “There was never a question on whether there would be a French program or not.”
This change, though much less worrisome than initially perceived, caused students to raise questions about Hellgate’s IB sectioning overall, leading to students planning on doing the full IB Diploma to become more vocal about their concerns surrounding the IB Diploma itself at the beginning of this school year.
“It’s difficult to find time to take classes expected by competitive colleges [like Chemistry, Calculus and Physics] when they are only provided in AP at Hellgate, while also doing all of the classes required for the IB Diploma,” said senior Lucy Hutchins.
Due to the fact that Hellgate is the only public high school in Missoula with offerings for both AP and IB classes, it can be difficult to have enough staffing and sectioning for all the classes the school would like to offer.
“If you look around the country, it is very rare to see a high school, especially a high school this size, have both programs,” Miller said. “There is a trickiness to having both.”
Hellgate French classes are a great, relevant example of this. According to Hellgate’s new French teacher, Brady Baughman, there are around 58 students in French 1 and around 47 in French 2, though there is only one French 3/4 class as of right now. This means that in the next couple years, there will be too many students looking to enroll in French 3/4, but only a single class period being offered.
“The goal is, in the future, to have another [French] teacher so we can have more sectioning for French 1, 2, and 3/4, hopefully splitting those [into separate classes],” Baughman said.
While this does seem like an obvious solution, and one that Hellgate is striving for, it can be a lengthy process to get approval from the district and from IB to be able to provide the class; find a teacher with the required training to teach the course; and then figure out the demand for the class and how many periods can be offered. It is important to keep in mind that these changes the school is working toward cannot be so easily achieved by simply deciding to provide the class.
“I think that’s a bigger conversation too, with not just Hellgate, but the district in general supporting our languages and supporting those classes,” Baughman said. “The goal within our department is that in the future there will be more sections and more staff.”
It can be difficult, as high school students, to understand why schools make the executive decisions that they do, especially with advanced classes and scheduling; students are majorly uninformed of the complexities of these decisions behind the scenes. Due to this, these decisions might seem unfair, especially the distribution between IB and AP classes while getting the credits and classes that one needs to fulfill a diploma or apply to competitive universities.
“We have strong participation in both [AP and IB] programs, and it’s something we’re going to continue indefinitely,” Miller said. “But both programs do require a forced choice for student scheduling.”
