At Mount Vernon High School, health class is taken by freshmen and sophomores through Edmentum. Edmentum is a website used for online classes, by taking tutorials, mastery tests, and post tests.

Edmentum can be a good option for students by allowing them to work at their own pace and helping the school free up more time for core classes. Health is an important subject students should take, but the method Mount Vernon uses might not be the best choice. So, are students truly getting a quality education through Edmentum?

When students have time to work on their online health course, most of the time they don’t actually complete the work. Instead, they tend to either skip through lessons, cheat using AI on tests, or not do the work at all. This encourages laziness and prevents learning. Additionally, many students fall behind because they forget about the class or lack someone, like a teacher, who keeps them on track and at the right pace.

If health were taken in person, it would allow conversations to occur between students and teachers. Since health can be a personal subject, acknowledging students’ own life choices, people shouldn’t be restricted to asking questions to a trusted adult. Seeing that, health is currently online, if a student has a question, they can’t get an immediate and accurate answer.

Lastly, Mount Vernon requires students to pass the online health class. When students aren’t given all the necessary resources from the school, it is very possible for some to not pass the class. This could cause students to take summer school, which nobody wants to do. So, instead of having to threaten summer school to students, if a teacher taught the health class, summer school would not likely be necessary.

Clearly, having health as an online class is not a great option for students educationally. So Mount Vernon High School should change health from being online to in-person.