HOWLAND — With students back in school for the second half of the year, the Howland Board of Education heard from one of the district’s principals about plans for the remainder of the year, as well as evaluations of last year’s changes.

At Monday’s regular board meeting, Howland High School Principal Joseph Simko said parents seem to “really like” that the school is trying to utilize parent-teacher conferences a bit more because the volume of conferences condenses at the high school level in the winter.

“We use that time for parent informational meetings for National Honor Society and Advanced Placement and College Credit Plus informational sessions for our course,” Simko said. “Our teachers do a great job with that.”

Simko said they plan to continue the informational sessions, based on the feedback the school has received.

Simko said the school has shrunk courses with smaller classes coming up.

“We’ve adapted over the years, adapted staffing or cut through attrition because we knew these small classes were coming up through,” Simko said. “Now there’s some electives that have been either outdated or have, for lack of a better term, butts in seats.”

Simko said there have been some courses that were replaced, others that were just replaced because they better fit kids’ interests based on what they’ve shared with staff and others that were affected by staffing — noting there was an off-site program at Lordstown that was cut because of a lack of interest.

Simko said the school was excited to provide Intro to American Sign Language as one of its newest courses.

“We hired a Spanish teacher last year; very fortunate — she’s incredible,” Simko said. “She had room in her schedule, as one of the things she had in her background was sign language (and) our kids were interested in having an option for that.”

Another new course the school has added is college and career readiness, focusing on the college application process and things “very specific” that students felt they could use extra guidance with, Simko said.

Simko said the school also has been focusing on shortcomings in its 2024-25 state report card, noting that school officials have been working on College and Career Readiness, a component on which they scored three stars.

“We got some help this year in regards to how to make sure we’re addressing little pockets of students that were considered by the report card to not be College and Career Readiness,” Simko said. “Even though we know what they were doing.”

Simko said the school should earn four to five stars in that component’s indicator by adjusting their work-based learning — a pocket of information that composed the grade.

“There was a pocket of kids, they get good grades, but nothing counted for them to count as college-ready even if all of those kids are going to college,” Simko said. “If we could get them to a work-based learning program, they would count as ready — a lot of them work as it is.”

Simko said the school has a Google Classroom set up for those kids that tracks their hours worked at their job and rewards them for it through a gift card raffle.

He said he was appreciative of the school’s counselors for working on ways to improve that area of the report card, adding that it was a busy time of year because it’s when students create their schedules.