How Private Schools Add Electives Without Hiring Teachers

TL;DR

• A single elective section, staffed the traditional way, costs a small school roughly $9,000–$14,000 a year — one-fifth of a loaded teacher salary — which works out to $700–$1,200 per enrolled student in a class of 12.
• There are five real options: stretch existing faculty, share a teacher with another school, hire an adjunct, use an accredited online partner, or run a self-paced platform with an on-site supervisor. Only the last two add courses without adding a payroll line.
• The question that decides most of it isn't cost — it's who is the teacher of record, and whether the coursework survives an accreditation visit. Get that answer in writing before you sign anything.

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Every head of school I talk to describes the same corner. Enrollment is healthy enough that families expect a real elective catalog — psychology, personal finance, coding, business, media. But you have 180 students, not 900. You cannot justify a 1.0 FTE for a course that 14 kids will take. So the catalog stays at art, band, and whatever your history teacher is willing to run during a free period.

That's not a curriculum problem. It's an arithmetic problem. Below is the arithmetic, and the five ways schools actually get around it.

What does one elective section really cost a private school?

Start with the number you already know: your loaded teacher cost. For most small private and Christian schools, salary plus benefits and payroll taxes lands somewhere between $47,000 and $70,000 per teacher. Use your own number — the point of this exercise is that you plug in yours.

A full-time teacher covers roughly five sections. So one section of one elective is about a fifth of that:

Loaded teacher cost	Cost of one section (1/5 FTE)	Per student at 12 enrolled	Per student at 20 enrolled
$47,000	$9,400	$783	$470
$55,000	$11,000	$917	$550
$70,000	$14,000	$1,167	$700

Two things jump out of that table. First, elective economics are brutal at small enrollments — the same course that's affordable at 20 students is nearly impossible at 8. Second, this is why your catalog is stuck: the courses students most want are usually the ones with the thinnest enrollment, so they're the first ones the budget kills.

We wrote up the fuller version of this calculation, including the hidden costs most schools leave out of it, in what an elective program actually costs per student.

Option 1: Stretch the faculty you already have

The default move. Your AP Bio teacher has a background in nutrition, so she picks up a health science elective as a sixth prep.

It's the cheapest option on paper and the most expensive one in practice. A sixth prep is real work — new materials, new assessments, new grading load — and it is the single most reliable way to lose a good teacher in a small school. If you go this route, buy the prep back honestly: reduce another duty, pay a stipend, and treat it as a real assignment rather than a favor.

Adds a course: yes. Adds a payroll line: no. Adds risk: to retention, yes.

Option 2: Share a teacher with another school

Independent School Management has written about this for years, and in some states public districts formally provide shared-time instructors to private schools for non-core subjects — art, music, PE, computers — because the arrangement can count toward district enrollment. Two nearby private schools can also split one specialist between campuses.

It works, and it's genuinely cheap. The constraints are logistical and they're stubborn: bell schedules rarely align, drive time eats a period on both ends, and you're now dependent on another institution's staffing decisions for a course on your transcript. Shared teachers also tend to be available for exactly the subjects you already cover, not the career-focused electives families are asking about.

Option 3: Hire an adjunct or community expert

A local CPA teaching one section of personal finance, a nurse teaching medical terminology, a working developer teaching intro programming. Passionate, credible, and cheap — usually a per-section stipend rather than a salary.

The catch is durability. Adjuncts leave when their day jobs get busy, often mid-year, and they rarely come with assessment design, a grade book habit, or documentation that will satisfy your accreditor. If you use adjuncts, pair each one with a full-time faculty member who owns the records.

Option 4: An accredited online partner with live instruction

Providers who employ certified teachers to deliver courses virtually to your students. This genuinely solves staffing — instruction and grading happen on their side.

Two things to check carefully before signing. First, price: per-course, per-student pricing is the norm here — a single BYU Online high school course runs $200 and up, for one course — so a student taking two or three electives adds up faster than the per-section math above suggests. Second, scheduling: live virtual courses lock your students into someone else's bell schedule, which is a real problem if your building already has a tight rotation.

Option 5: A self-paced platform with an on-site supervisor

This is the model we built, so read the rest with that in mind.

The students take self-paced, mastery-based coursework — in our case with Meri, an AI tutor embedded in every lesson that pushes back when a student types a one-word answer instead of thinking. A faculty member on your campus supervises a study block, watches progress on a dashboard, and stays the teacher of record. No new hire, no new prep, no external bell schedule.

The cost math is the reason schools look at it. Our school licensing runs $149 per student per year, $129 at 25+ students, and $109 at 50+ — and that's for the full catalog of 55 courses, not one course. Set that against $700–$1,200 per student for a single staffed section and the comparison isn't close. (Full tiers are on the pricing page.)

The honest tradeoff: self-paced coursework demands more from the student and more from your supervision structure than a live teacher does. A study hall where nobody's watching the dashboard produces exactly the completion rates you'd expect. Most online electives industry-wide finish in the 15–25% range, and that's a supervision failure more than a content failure. The whole design premise here is courses your students will actually finish — but the on-site adult is load-bearing, not optional.

Who is the teacher of record?

This is the question that should decide your choice, and it's the one most vendors are vague about.

State and accreditor rules vary widely. California, for example, distinguishes between the credentialed teacher of record who delivers instruction and assigns the grade, and the on-site employee who merely supervises students in a room — the supervisor is explicitly not the teacher of record. Other states are looser; most accreditors care primarily that a qualified adult at your institution owns the grade and can defend it.

The practical rule: whichever option you pick, name the adult on your staff who owns the grade, and make sure your systems produce the evidence they'd need to defend it. With an outsourced live-instruction provider, the teacher of record is usually theirs, which can complicate your transcript. With a self-paced platform, the teacher of record stays yours — which is why the supervision tooling matters so much.

We go deeper on the documentation side in accreditation requirements for online elective credit and on the seat-time question in Carnegie Unit compliance for AI-delivered courses.

Will these courses count for credit?

Yes, if the course is built to. Credit rests on three things your accreditor will ask about: documented instructional hours or demonstrated mastery, assessments tied to standards, and records that survive an audit.

Our courses are Carnegie Unit compliant and standards-aligned, each earning real high school credit, with a standards crosswalk document available for your accreditation file. Every submission is rubric-graded, and the portfolio populates automatically as students work — so the evidence exists whether or not anyone remembers to build a binder in April.

What supervision actually requires from your faculty

The realistic ask for the on-site supervisor is a study block on the schedule and about 20–30 minutes a week per section reviewing the dashboard: who's stalled, who's coasting, who's producing thin work that the tutor already flagged. That's a duty assignment, not a prep.

What it is not is an LMS deployment. Most small schools don't need another system to administer — they need to see progress and intervene. We've written about that distinction in supervisor dashboards vs. LMS, and it's the piece most schools get wrong when they shop for this.

How to decide before your catalog locks

A workable sequence for a small school:

1. Run your own numbers. Loaded teacher cost ÷ 5 sections ÷ realistic enrollment. Do it for the three electives families keep asking for.
2. Survey the actual demand. Ask families which four electives they'd pick. Small schools routinely guess wrong about this.
3. Name the teacher of record for each option and check it against your accreditor's language, not the vendor's.
4. Pilot one term before you commit a catalog line. Whatever the model, run it with one cohort and one supervisor first.

Some background on how peer schools work through the same decision is in how small private schools solve the elective gap and the elective staffing crisis.

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Start a pilot for this fall

Our school pilot is 14 days, minimum 10 students, and includes onboarding with a real person — you pick two or three electives, put one supervisor on a study block, and see whether the model fits your building before it touches your catalog.

Founding school pricing is $99 per student for year one, for our first ten schools. That offer is still open — we're forming the founding cohort now, and schools that start a pilot this month are live for day one of the fall term.

Start Your Pilot → · See how it works for schools · Browse the course catalog

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About the author

Steve Smith is the founder of Elective Genius and Genius Learning. He built the platform for the problem he was living with — a school that owed its families a serious elective catalog and could not staff one — and we run the program in our own school before we ask anyone else to. He writes about elective programs, school budgets, and what AI can and can't responsibly do in a high school classroom.