Where Did the Second Elective Go? Sometimes innovation looks a lot like regular school.
Updated: 2 days ago
Four years ago, in the spring of 2023, my wife, Gwen, and I found ourselves asking a pretty simple question about our daughter’s eighth-grade schedule at Avon Middle School North in Indiana:
Where did the second elective go?
I wasn’t initially trying to make an argument about intervention, standardized testing, school accountability, or even fine arts. I was trying to understand the schedule.
I had spent much of my professional life working in and around public schools and had seen a lot of middle school schedules. I knew what a healthy middle school day could look like. There are only so many minutes available, and when I looked at Kierstyn’s schedule, I couldn’t quite figure out where the time had gone.
So I started following the minutes.
I remember visiting with her principal, Matt, and trying to understand how the school day was constructed. We ultimately developed a good relationship, and I don’t remember those conversations as confrontational. I was genuinely trying to solve a puzzle. There were enough minutes in the school day. So where was the second elective?
Eventually, we found it: WINN — What I Need Now.
Avon Middle School North described WINN in a March 2022 communication to families as a 35-minute period between first and second periods, four days a week. Students who benefited from additional math or language arts instruction could receive that help during WINN. Students who weren’t receiving that targeted assistance still had the period, remaining with their first-period teachers and working on math or language arts through IXL.
WINN wasn’t a short-lived initiative. Avon still uses it today. In September 2026, Avon Middle School South explained to families that students’ WINN assignments may be adjusted based on their progress so that the “support or enrichment opportunities” they receive meet their needs.
That’s worth pointing out because my concern wasn’t—and isn’t—that WINN was some failed program. There is an entirely reasonable educational idea behind it: create time within the school day to respond to individual student needs. Avon has continued refining that idea.
My question was about the opportunity cost of creating that time universally.
For people who don't spend their lives speaking education, this is where a quick explanation of Tier 2 might be helpful. Avon itself uses the term Tier 2 intervention for additional targeted academic support, including reading and math intervention. In the broader MTSS framework, Tier 1 is the core instruction provided to every student; Tier 2 provides additional support for students who need something more.
That makes perfect sense. A student needs additional help; identify the need and provide the help.
But our scheduling question had uncovered a different question:
If Tier 1 is for everyone and Tier 2 is for students who need something more, what happens when we reserve intervention time in everyone’s schedule? At some point, we aren’t just designing an intervention anymore. We’re designing universal curriculum.
Those minutes had to come from somewhere.
And that’s where we found the second elective.
It hadn’t disappeared. The system had decided how to use it.
The Bigger Question
Avon certainly wasn’t alone. In conversations with principals and fine arts directors in half a dozen states since, I’ve heard some version of the same story.
Schools face enormous pressure around student performance. Standardized state assessments identify gaps. Campus and district improvement plans identify areas requiring attention, and schools are expected to demonstrate what they are doing about them. One response has been to use additional time during the school day for intervention, remediation, test preparation, and progress monitoring.
Again, the instinct isn’t unreasonable. If students aren’t learning something, schools should do something about it.
But systems have a funny way of growing. An intervention for some students becomes a period. The period becomes part of the master schedule, and the master schedule eventually becomes simply the way we do school. Somewhere along the way, we can stop asking what else might have occupied that time.
That’s what concerned Gwen and me.
Our argument wasn’t that children who were struggling shouldn’t receive additional instruction. Quite the opposite. Our question was whether every child should surrender opportunity in order for the system to create a place to deliver intervention to the children who need it.
Because the opportunity cost is real. Those minutes might have accommodated another choir or band, art, theatre, Spanish, technology, or whatever else a school and community could offer. More importantly, they might provide an opportunity for a 12-year-old to encounter something they don’t yet know they love.
We called it the opportunity of experience.
Four Years Later, a Message From Harlingen
This week, Kara Hoeflinger, Director of Music Programs for Harlingen CISD in South Texas, sent me a message. She said she immediately thought of some of the things I’ve been writing about concerning systemic barriers to student opportunity.
Harlingen has been working intentionally to increase access to electives for its middle school students. At Moises V. Vela Middle School, Principal Venessa Acosta and her team made a relatively simple but significant change to the master schedule.
Their problem sounded awfully familiar. Academic support was consuming space in the schedule that could otherwise provide students additional elective opportunities.
So they changed the schedule—not the kids.
Students who need additional academic support still receive it. RTE remains available and targeted to those students, while an Impact period provides another opportunity for intentional tutorials and intervention. They didn’t eliminate intervention; they reconsidered how and when to deliver it.
And they gave kids an elective back.
Maybe Recruiting Wasn't the Problem: 80 Became 180
Then Kara gave me a number. Choir had been serving approximately 80 students. It now serves approximately 180, and she reports similar growth across other electives.
I’m a fine arts guy, so obviously I like that number. But I don’t think this is fundamentally a choir story.
It’s a systems story.
Maybe the choir director didn’t suddenly become twice as good at recruiting. Maybe middle school students in Harlingen didn’t suddenly develop a remarkable new enthusiasm for choral music. Maybe a whole bunch of kids simply couldn’t get to the class before.
That distinction matters for those of us who spend our lives worrying about enrollment. When participation declines, we tend to look first at the teacher: recruit harder, visit the elementary schools, call the parents, make better videos, create better experiences.
Those things matter. But before asking a teacher to recruit ten more students, perhaps we should ask whether the master schedule has room for them when they arrive.
Sometimes the most important recruiting question is much simpler:
Can the kid actually put the class in the schedule?
You cannot recruit your way around a structural barrier.
“I Really Wanted to Do Both”
Harlingen CISD produced a short video about the change, and Kara shared it with me.
One student featured in the video explains the problem better than I can. He needed academic support, but he also wanted an elective. His mother describes the relief she felt when she learned that her son wouldn’t have to choose between something he enjoyed and the academic support he needed.
Her son says something remarkably simple:
He wanted both.
He understands that academics matter. He talks about needing an education so he can eventually get a good job, but he also wants to have fun and learn something new. He wanted access to both academic support and an elective.
Another student in the video describes what happened when she had room in her schedule for Spanish and a full year of choir. She discovered that she was a little more outgoing than she thought, that she picked up material faster than she expected, and that she really liked choir.
There isn’t a standardized assessment in America that could have told her that.
Schools can measure what children know. We can identify what they don’t know, locate gaps, prescribe interventions, and monitor progress.
But we cannot measure what children might discover about themselves through experiences they have never been allowed to have.
That’s the opportunity of experience.
And They Still Get the Help
This may be my favorite part of the Harlingen story. They didn’t solve the elective problem by abandoning students who need academic support.
In the district’s video, an educator explains how the Impact period allows teachers to work intentionally with students in RTE, including focused tutorials and intervention beginning early in the school year.
In other words, this isn’t academics or electives, and it isn’t intervention or enrichment.
The better question is: Why not both?
Students who need help get help. And they still get to make music.
That’s not lowering academic expectations. That’s scheduling.
Back to Regular School
We have plenty of impressive terminology available for all of this: MTSS, Tier 1, Tier 2, RTE, intervention, remediation, progress monitoring, Impact periods, master scheduling, student engagement, enrichment.
But after watching Harlingen’s video, I keep coming back to a slightly irreverent thought:
They’re basically going back to doing regular school.
Teach children well. When somebody needs additional help, give them additional help. Then leave enough room in the school day for children to discover things—to sing, paint, act, build, play an instrument, learn another language, discover they’re more outgoing than they thought, or find out they’re good at something nobody has ever tested.
Let them find their people.
That isn’t something distracting them from their education.
That is their education.
Four years ago, Gwen and I looked at our eighth grader’s schedule in Indiana and asked a simple question:
Where did the second elective go?
This week, a friend in South Texas sent me a video.
Harlingen found it.
They changed the system, targeted the support, and gave children opportunity back. Choir went from about 80 students to about 180.
One student got to be in band. Another discovered that she likes to sing.
Sometimes innovation looks a lot like regular school.
∗ ∗ ∗
Jeremy L. Earnhart, Ed.D.
Founder & Principal
School Music & Fine Arts, LLC
Former President & CEO, Music for All
Former Director of Fine Arts, Arlington ISD & Irving ISD
Research at the intersection of educational strategy, organizational design, and school finance. Helping school leaders uncover hidden capacity, strengthen student opportunity, and improve organizational performance through strategic fine arts design.
His work has been covered by The New York Times, NPR/KERA, Marketplace, CBS 11, NBC 5, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The New York Times highlighted Arlington ISD's decision to eliminate instrument rental fees, noting that band participation at the middle and high school levels "jumped" (Rich, 2015).
That work continues in The Cost of Not Playing (2026), Dr. Earnhart’s ongoing research on the systems-level impact of music participation in public schools.
His doctoral research centered around the competencies of the central office music administrator:
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