While filling out my CRF form at the end of my junior year, I realized that my Journalism class was not meeting the fine arts requirements to graduate. I was forced to take Digital Media 2, since I did Digital Media 1 already, even when I was planning on taking Iliad (Journalism).
Poway High School requires students to take two trimesters of fine arts as one of their graduation requirements. Fine arts include theater, music, and visual arts. Some examples would be digital media, drama, and photography. Fine arts are required to work critical thinking skills that are outside of traditional academics.
Poway also offers many college preparatory classes, such as journalism, yearbook, psychology, etc. Most of these classes do belong in this category, but not all of them. Journalism, Yearbook, and Broadcast Journalism are considered to be only college prep classes and not fine art classes. I believe that these three classes successfully show a form of the arts.
In Yearbook and Journalism, students are designing pages. The Yearbook and Newspaper pages require photography, photo editing, writing, and graphic design. Students put a lot of time and effort into these pages and express their creativity in doing so.
In broadcast journalism, their newscasts are shown three times a week to the whole school during their 3rd period classes. It makes no sense that making films in digital media counts as a fine art but making films in broadcast journalism does not.
Many students, like me, are stuck with a random fine art in their senior year because they were unaware that certain classes did not count towards their fine arts.
Some classes seemed like they belonged in the fine arts category, but they just do not, which led me to almost not meet the A-G requirements.
I also wish that counselors had done a better job of highlighting those requirements and encouraging students to finish the fine arts requirements before their senior year. If they did so, senior students would have had a wider variety of class options.
Journalism, Yearbook and Broadcast Journalism classes should count towards students’ fine arts requirements because even though they are college preparatory classes, they all combine multiple concepts of art into one class.