How Many Electives Should a Small High School Offer?

TL;DR

• There is no magic number. The better question is how many real choices each student gets every semester, because a catalog of twelve courses means nothing if the schedule only lets a junior pick between two.
• A small high school should aim for at least three live options in every elective period, a menu that covers the major career interests of its students, and enough depth that a student can take more than one course in an area they care about.
• Most small schools cannot staff that with teachers alone. The math on a new teaching line rarely works for a section of eight students, which is why a supervised online elective layer has become the practical way to widen the menu.

Almost every head of school I talk with asks some version of this question, usually with a little embarrassment. They know their catalog is thin. They have looked at the school across town with the forty-page course guide. And they want to know what "enough" looks like for a school with 60, 90, or 140 students in grades 9–12.

I run a small Christian school myself, so I have asked the same question in my own office. Here is how I would think it through.

Why "how many electives" is the wrong first question

Course count is the number that shows up in a course guide, so it is the number people compare. But it measures the wrong thing.

Picture two schools. School A lists fourteen electives. School B lists eight. School A looks stronger on paper. Now look at the schedule. At School A, half of those fourteen courses run in the same period, a few only run every other year, and three of them require a prerequisite most students never take. In practice, a sophomore gets to choose between art and yearbook. At School B, all eight courses are open to every grade, and they are spread across two elective periods. That sophomore has four real choices.

School B is offering more electives, even though it lists fewer.

So before you count courses, count choices. For each grade, in each semester, how many electives can a student actually get into? That number is what parents feel, and it is what a student remembers when they tell a friend whether your school "has anything."

How many electives do students actually need to graduate?

This depends on your state and your accreditor, so start there. Graduation frameworks vary widely. Florida's standard diploma, for example, includes 8 elective credits out of 24. Texas requires 5. Many private schools set their own totals somewhere in between, and some fold fine arts, technology, and a second language into required categories that behave like electives in practice.

For planning, the useful number is this: across four years, a typical student at a small school takes somewhere between four and eight semester-length electives. If each is a half-credit course, that is two to four Carnegie units of elective credit.

That tells you the minimum. A school can technically meet graduation requirements with a very short list. But a school that only meets the minimum is not offering electives. It is offering a required course with a different name.

A practical target for a small high school

Here is the standard I use. It is not an official benchmark, just a working rule from years of building schedules with too few people.

1. At least three live options in every elective period. Two options is a coin flip. Three is the smallest number where a student feels like they chose.

2. Coverage across the interests your students actually have. Look at where your graduates go. Most small schools send students into healthcare, business, technology, ministry and teaching, the trades, and law or public service. If your elective menu has nothing that touches three of those, students heading there are guessing.

3. Depth in at least a few areas. A student interested in medicine should be able to take more than one course that points in that direction. One-off courses are fine for exploration. A sequence is what turns an interest into a direction, and it is what an admissions reader notices.

4. Something new every year for returning students. A senior who has already taken everything on your list will tell you so. A catalog that turns over a little each year keeps the upper grades engaged.

For a school with 80 high school students, that usually lands somewhere around ten to fifteen distinct elective courses available over a two-year cycle, with at least three open in any given period. For a school with 150 students, closer to fifteen to twenty. Your numbers will move with your schedule, but that is a reasonable place to start the conversation.

Why small schools rarely get there

Almost no small school falls short on purpose. The limit is staff.

A typical elective at a small school enrolls six to twelve students. Hiring a teacher to cover a new subject costs somewhere in the range of $47,000 to $70,000 once salary and benefits are counted. Even if that teacher covers three sections, you are paying thousands of dollars per student, per course, for something that will enroll eight kids and may not fill next year. I walked through that math in more detail in what an elective actually costs per seat.

So schools do the reasonable thing. They ask existing teachers to stretch. The science teacher takes on an environmental course. The pastor teaches a Bible elective. The athletic director runs a health class. Those courses are often good. But you can only stretch a faculty so far, and every stretch comes out of planning time and energy for core classes.

The result is a catalog built around who happens to be on staff, not around what students need. That is the real reason small school elective menus look thin.

How the schedule limits you, even with good courses

The master schedule is the second constraint, and it is often invisible until you try to add something.

With one elective period, every elective competes with every other elective. With two, you can split by grade band or pair a year-long course with semester options. With a rotating block, you can sometimes fit three or four. But each added period costs something else, usually a study hall, a chapel slot, or a core section.

The most useful move I have seen is to stop treating each elective as its own section. If one supervising adult can oversee a room where students are working in several different courses at once, one period can hold five or six electives instead of one. That is how a small school gets to "three live options in every period" without building three new sections.

It also makes rostering far easier. A student who wants psychology and a student who wants personal finance can sit in the same room, in the same period, with the same supervising teacher.

How to add electives without adding a teaching line

This is the model we built Elective Genius around, and it is how my own school runs its elective program.

The school keeps its supervising teacher. That teacher owns the period, sees every student's progress on a dashboard, reviews submitted projects, and signs off on grades. The instruction inside each course comes from the course itself: structured lessons, projects, quizzes, and Meri, an AI tutor built into every lesson that asks students to explain their thinking rather than handing them answers.

Today that catalog is 31 high school courses across six career pathways: Healthcare, Business & Finance, Technology, Law & Society, Creative & Communication, and Life & Career Readiness. Every high school course is a full semester elective worth 0.5 credit, aligned to the Carnegie Unit. You can browse the pathways to see how the courses group together, which is also how a school gets the depth described above without designing sequences from scratch.

The cost is per seat, not per section: $149 per student per year, $129 at 25 or more students, and $109 at 50 or more. See current pricing. Compared against a new hire, a school can put a full elective menu in front of every high school student for a fraction of one salary. If you want a longer walk through the budget side, how to fund an elective program inside a private school budget covers it.

That does not replace your best teacher-led electives. It fills the gaps around them. Keep the art class your art teacher loves. Add the healthcare and business sequences nobody on staff can teach.

What a thin catalog costs you beyond the schedule

It is easy to treat electives as a nice extra. For small schools, they are not.

Families compare course guides when they choose a school, and a short list reads as "small school, fewer opportunities" whether or not that is fair. I wrote about that more directly in how small schools compete on course catalog. Students who cannot find anything they care about in grades 10 and 11 are the ones who start looking elsewhere. And colleges read a transcript for evidence of direction. A student who took three healthcare courses tells a clearer story than one who took whatever fit the schedule.

The catalog is part of your admissions pitch, your retention plan, and your graduates' college applications at the same time.

Frequently asked

How many electives does a typical high school offer? It varies enormously with size. Large public high schools often list dozens. Small private schools commonly offer somewhere between five and fifteen, with fewer actually running in any given year. The number that matters more is how many a student can choose from in a given period.

How many electives should a student take per year? Most students take one or two elective courses per year, which works out to four to eight semester courses across high school. Check your own graduation requirements and your accreditor's expectations.

Should electives be year-long or semester-long? For a small school, semester-length electives give students more variety and give you more flexibility. A student can try two areas in one year instead of committing to one.

Can online electives count for credit at an accredited school? Yes, when your school owns the course of record. Your school decides what goes on its transcript, your supervising teacher signs off on grades, and the course should be aligned to Carnegie Unit expectations. Talk with your accreditor about your specific setup.

What about middle school? Grades 6–8 have the same staffing problem and often feel it earlier. A short exploratory wheel is a good fit there. See the middle school menu.

About the author

Steve Smith is the founder of Elective Genius and spent 25 years in education before building it. He also runs Rosedale Christian Academy, where every middle- and high-school student uses the platform, which means every decision here gets tested on his own students first. Reach him at schools@electivegenius.com.

Start your pilot

If your elective list is shorter than your students' interests, you do not need to solve it all at once. Pick one elective period, one supervising teacher, and one semester. Put the full menu in front of those students and see what they choose.

Start Your Pilot or book a school demo.