How a Small Private School Builds a Middle School Elective Program

TL;DR

• Most small schools solve the high school elective problem first and leave middle school with whatever the homeroom teacher can cover on Friday afternoon. Grades 6–8 have the same staffing gap, and they feel it earlier.
• A middle school elective is not a smaller high school course. Its job is exploration: short, varied, low-stakes, and still graded well enough that a parent and a teacher can see what happened.
• You do not need a teacher per subject to run a real exploratory wheel. You need one supervising adult, a menu students can choose from, and a per-seat cost that makes sense for a course that runs a few weeks.

Every conversation I have with a head of school about electives starts with high school. That is where the transcript is, where the college question lives, and where parents push hardest. So that is where the budget goes.

Then, about three weeks into the conversation, the same sentence shows up: "And honestly, middle school is worse."

It usually is. A high school with 90 students can at least justify one part-time elective teacher. A middle school with 55 students across three grades often has nothing between the core subjects except a study hall. Families notice, especially the ones who transferred in from a school with band and a coding club.

This post is about building a middle school elective program at a school that size, without a hiring line. It covers what the program is actually for, how the exploratory wheel works when you only have one adult to run it, what it should cost, and how it connects to the high school program you may already have.

What is the purpose of middle school electives?

The research literature on middle-level education has been consistent about this for decades: grades 6–8 are the exploration years. The classic middle school model calls these courses "exploratory," and the word matters.

A high school elective asks a student to commit. It carries credit, it goes on a transcript, and it takes a semester. A middle school elective asks a student to try. It should be short enough that a bad fit costs nothing, and varied enough that a student finds at least one thing they did not know they liked.

That distinction changes how you build the program. You are not trying to replicate a high school catalog at a lower reading level. You are trying to put a lot of different doors in front of an 11-year-old and let them open a few.

For a head of school, there is a second purpose that is less often said out loud. Middle school is where families decide whether to stay for high school. A student who discovers a real interest in seventh grade, and sees that your high school offers the next step in it, is a retention story. We wrote more about that in small school retention strategies.

What electives should a middle school offer?

Public middle schools with an exploratory wheel tend to cycle students through some version of the same list: art, music, technology or computers, a family and consumer science course, some industrial or maker work, and increasingly coding and media.

At a small private school, I would sort the menu into two groups.

A small core you assign. These are the subjects you believe every middle schooler should touch before ninth grade. For most schools that means career exploration, money basics, and some honest instruction on how to use AI tools well. Study habits and writing belong here too. Financial literacy and career readiness requirements keep spreading at the high school level, and a sixth grader who has already met those ideas is better prepared for them.

A wider set students choose. This is where engagement comes from. Entrepreneurship, psychology, game design, forensic science, astronomy, photography, debate, cooking, environmental science. Nobody needs all of these. Every student needs a few options that feel like theirs.

The Elective Genius middle school catalog is built on exactly that shape: five core strands and nineteen choice electives, 24 courses in all, for grades 6–8. You can assign the core and let students pick the rest, which is how most schools already think about electives in high school.

How does an exploratory wheel work at a small school?

In a large middle school, the wheel is a staffing arrangement. Students rotate every quarter or trimester through four or five teachers, each of whom owns a room and a subject. The rotation exists so every student sees every specialist.

A small school does not have the specialists, which is why most small schools do not have a wheel.

The version that works at your size turns the model around. Instead of students rotating through teachers, one supervising adult holds the room, and each student works through their own sequence of short courses. Two seventh graders sitting next to each other can be in Space Explorers and Kid Boss during the same period. When one finishes, they start the next.

For that to work, three things have to be true.

1. The courses have to teach, not just present. A video playlist with a worksheet will not hold a 12-year-old for a quarter. In our courses every lesson runs through a warm-up, checkpoints, a hands-on activity, and a reflection, with Meri, an AI tutor tuned for grades 6–8, working through each step with the student.
2. The supervising adult has to see what is happening without grading everything by hand. That means a dashboard that shows progress by student and by module, not a gradebook export at the end of the term.
3. The course has to be short. Our middle school modules run 4–6 hours of student work each. That is deliberate. It is long enough to produce something real and short enough that a student can move through two or three in a semester.

If you want the staffing side of this in more detail, how private schools add electives without hiring teachers walks through the supervising-teacher model for high school. The middle school version is the same idea with shorter courses and more rotation.

Should middle school electives be graded?

Yes, and the grading should be honest about what the course is.

Middle school electives do not carry credit, and ours are no exception: 0.0 credit hours, by design. But "no credit" is not the same as "no record." Parents want to know what their child did. Your teachers want to know who is actually working. And at the end of a semester you want something better than "participated."

What we built for that is the Explorer Report. For each student and each module it shows completion, quiz results from the unit knowledge checks, and how Meri judged the student's mastery during the lessons. The supervising teacher then stamps a verdict of Pass, Merit, or Incomplete. That verdict belongs to your teacher, not to the software, which is how it should be.

Every module also ends in a Showcase Project: a short presentation, demonstration, or portfolio piece the student makes from the work they did in the course. For a small school that has an unexpected second use. It gives you real student work to put on the table at open house, which is where middle school programs are actually sold.

What does a middle school elective program cost?

Start with the number you are avoiding. A new teaching line at a small private school costs somewhere between $47,000 and $70,000 once you include benefits. For a middle school of 55 students, that is roughly $850 to $1,270 per student per year for one person who can teach, at best, two or three subjects well. The full math is in the per-seat cost of a private school teacher.

Then look at what the middle school program has to deliver. Short courses, lots of variety, and no credit. Paying a high school price for that makes no sense, and we did not price it that way.

Our middle school seat is $49 per student per year, and it covers all 24 modules. Two details matter for a small school's budget:

• One seat serves the whole menu. A student who finishes Money Basics and moves on to Code Explorers is not buying a second course.
• Seats reuse at semester. A seat freed at the end of fall can serve a different student in the spring, in the same year. If you run the elective period for sixth grade in the fall and seventh grade in the spring, you do not buy the seats twice.

For a middle school of 55 students, a year of electives on that model costs $2,695 before any semester reuse. Our full school pricing, including high school seats, is on the pricing page.

How do middle school electives connect to high school?

This is the part most programs miss, and it is where a small school can do something a large one rarely does.

Each middle school module points to a related high school course. A student who likes Kid Boss in seventh grade has an obvious next step in the high school entrepreneurship course. A student who finishes Crack the Case and How People Think has a reason to look at psychology or law.

For ready eighth graders, the bridge can be literal. They can step into a real high school elective for credit before ninth grade. That is a conversation to have with your own registrar, because your school decides what goes on its transcript. But the option exists, and it gives a strong eighth grader something concrete to aim at.

It also makes your high school catalog easier to sell. If you are building a career pathways program at the high school level, middle school is where students first meet those pathways, at a price and a stakes level that lets them change their minds.

A word on younger students and privacy

Most of your middle schoolers are under 13, and that should change how you evaluate any online program. Ask every vendor, including us, exactly what they collect from a child, what they keep, and who authorizes it.

Our middle school courses run under your school's COPPA authorization. We collect only what the lessons need, keep no audio, and build no student profile. You should hold any vendor to a written answer on the same points. How a head of school evaluates an online curriculum vendor has the longer checklist.

Frequently asked

How many electives should a middle schooler take in a year? In a rotation model, two to four short modules a semester is a realistic pace for one elective period. The goal is breadth, so more variety beats more depth at this age.

Do we need a certified teacher in the room? You need a responsible adult who owns the period and the verdicts. For no-credit exploratory courses, many schools use an existing teacher during a planning-light period. Check your accreditor's expectations for your specific setup.

Can we run middle school without the high school program? Yes. A school can buy middle school seats on their own.

About the author

Steve Smith is the founder of Elective Genius and an administrator at Rosedale Christian Academy, where the school runs its own elective program on Elective Genius. He built it because his school could not staff the courses its students wanted, and he was not willing to tell them to wait.

Start a middle school pilot

If your middle school has an elective period and nobody to fill it, start small. Pick one grade, one supervising teacher, and one semester, and decide at the end whether it earned a second.

Start Your Pilot or book a school demo. You can also browse the full middle school menu first.