Golden Valley High School’s Principal Sal Frias sat down with KHTS to discuss the new academic year.

Golden Valley High’s focus this year is to improve student communication and teach them how to deal with conversations in groups, according to Frias. A big push for his school this year will be teaching students how to agree and disagree, while still being able to develop something collectively, as opposed to worrying about tests and scantrons.

“It’s a higher levels of thinking,” said Frias. “Critical thinkers with technical skills. It’s more of a challenge today.”

However, despite Frias’s support for more group-oriented styles of learning, he did touch on the school’s math and English standardized test goals.

“We always want to improve and increase student achievement,” Frias said, “also want to improve our Advanced Placement (AP) performance.”

The school has three goals for the new year: To increase the number of students enrolled in AP courses; to increase the number of AP exams those enrolled students take; and to increase those AP test score results.

Outside of the annual academic goals that Golden Valley High School strives to achieve, Frias mentioned that they want to add community service and citizenship goals.

These goals include producing students that give back to their community in a meaningful way.

Frias said that with their athletics program, they are trying to establish programs that encourage and recognize students and how they have an effect on the community.

One of these types of recognition programs is meant to identify a student athlete of the month along with a student of the month by department. The focus is not over just being good students academically, but to see how and if they are being a good citizen, according to Frias.

Frias is proud to say that every school in the William S. Hart School District is equipped with Wi-Fi and that school administrators and faculty continue to enhance student-access to technology.

For instance, Golden Valley has made 85 ChromeBooks available to students.

Frias also acknowledged that going to college could be a hard “recipe” for most. However, the the district and College of the Canyons have partnered up to offer after-school college level courses that require higher skill development such as forestry, firefighting, EMT and medical science.

“Students are thinking do I have to go to college or should I go to university? Well, they are learning how to do both and it really is a nice combination of things.”

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