EXETER – Wyoming Area Secondary students will see significant changes to their curriculum and school- day schedules next year, district officials have announced.

At its meeting last week, the Wyoming Area Board of Education ratified a new program of studies for the Wyoming Area Secondary Center for the 2026-27 school year. Wyoming Area Superintendent Jon Pollard said the district will be releasing more information to parents about the changes in the near future. He said the district may also hold an open house in the future to discuss the changes if the district feels such a forum is necessary.

“Yeah, there’s going to be some significant ones,”  Pollard said at the school board meeting Wednesday when asked whether “any major changes” will be included in the new program. “There’s going to be a pretty big information dump coming to parents here in the next several weeks.”

Pollard said the new program will include several alterations to academic programs and routines at the school. He said changes will be made to what electives are offered to students and the number of periods in a school day, though there will be no change to the school day’s overall length. Explaining the rationale changes, Pollard said he was trying to orient the curriculum more towards giving students more preparation for post-secondary education or careers, while also bringing up standardized test scores.

(Wyoming Area has seen overall declines in student performance on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams, standardized tests administered to students in third through eighth grade, particularly when comparing performance before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every school district based in Luzerne County has seen declines over the same time period, as have school districts generally statewide.)

“(We are) just trying to revamp some things to make sure that we’re better preparing our students, not only for life, but also to do better on our standardized tests,” Pollard said.

After the school board meeting, Pollard further detailed the district’s motivations for the new changes. Pollard said he was specifically seeking to ensure students can “pass their standardized tests and be able to walk into the world of work, walk into secondary education, the military, anything that they chose after here.”

“(The new program of study is) providing adequate time on instruction that’s focused in on making sure the kids are leaving here with the concepts and competencies to be functional in society,” Pollard said.

Wyoming Area Board of Education President Mara Valenti praised the changes, thanking Pollard and Wyoming Area Secondary Principal Greg Riley for their work on designing the new schedule and curriculum.

“I, for one, couldn’t be prouder of what they came up with,” Valenti said. “And I think the future of Wyoming Area is very bright and the success of these students is going to be evident with some of these changes.”

Pollard the revisions the school board approved Wednesday were part of a broader agenda of change at Wyoming Area. In December, the Wyoming Area Board of Education approved the purchase of the Student Information System program from the company Infinite Campus. The new program, school officials said, consolidate several virtual programs that students, parents, and guardians use during the school day in order to do things like obtain hall passes or check grades.

“We just want to make sure that we’re being comprehensive in presenting (new information about these changes) to parents, so that they have…the opportunity to digest it as we’re moving through the remainder of the year,” Pollard said.