On Thursday, December 5th, a group of students, teachers, and faculty members from Griffith Public Schools took a trip to Buffalo Grove High School in Illinois where they toured the highly admired school to feed off of their innovative ideas. The Griffith Public Schools cooperation is always striving to improve their schools in the best interest of the students. The tour at Buffalo Grove offered a new reality of what Griffith Public Schools could eventually be in the future. 

The trip was attended by teachers, guidance counselors, technical aids, school board members and few students all offering their honest feedback about what they liked about Buffalo Grove High School. The plan is to slowly incorporate these ideas into Griffith High School to improve the quality of the school for the students. Buffalo Grove is a massive school with multiple classes for every career in the career clusters. They have automotive, fashion, medical, teaching, construction, culinary, and many more classes that are shaped to feel like you are in a certain workplace. In this way, students are more likely to discover what career they want to pursue by the time they are juniors or seniors in high school. 

The school also offers blending and flex schedules. Blending is when students are able to work on other important things in their classes, even if it’s not specific for the class they are currently in. For example, if students have a chemistry project that they already completed, they can spend the time they have in chemistry to work together on studying for their calculus test later that day. It gives students more of an opportunity to integrate different subjects together, while also decreasing the amount of homework they have to take home every night. Flex schedules give students more freedom. This allows them to spend a whole class period working on a project anywhere in the school, and utilize their time by going to study rooms or sitting in the lounges to work with other students during a class period. It also gives them something to do with the time they receive during free periods. Most students at Buffalo Grove like to go to the library to study whenever they want, because they don’t need a pass to go anywhere. All of these aspects of Buffalo Grove are what makes it a highly esteemed school, and is the reason why Griffith Public Schools toured it in the first place.

Freshman Maya Perez, who was one of three students attending the trip, said, “I thought Buffalo Grove High School was amazing! The blending of subjects and having the classrooms model the workplace makes the kids actually enjoy learning. The atmosphere was completely different compared to Griffith High School. I would honestly transfer today if I could, because I would love to advance my learning by going to Buffalo Grove High School. If Griffith could somehow eventually become as good a school as Buffalo Grove, I have no doubt in my mind that the students here would actually enjoy what they’re being taught.”

The faculty and student reviews about Griffith High School were favorable enough to make the administrators realize that they should start changing Griffith Public Schools to further the education of the students attending. It took Buffalo Grove six years to become the school they are today. To get started, Griffith Public Schools is willing to take baby steps each day and hopefully get to a point where they become the one school in Indiana that every student wants to go to. In the future, the Griffith school system could have a whole new outlook.