News Photo by Julie Riddle Thunder Bay Junior High School student Asa Blanchard, left, explains a block model city to fellow students Selah Blanchard, Lillian Blanchard, and Lucy Buchinger at the school on Monday.

ALPENA — Local pre-teens will stretch their creative muscles a little further next year after the Alpena Public Schools Board of Education on Monday broadened the school’s electives options with the addition of four new courses to the Thunder Bay Junior High School class lineup.

Come September, Alpena junior highers will have access to classes in creative writing, world cultures, theater, and “Innovators Plus,” a class encouraging students’ hands-on creation skills.

The classes will help students find and dig deeper into their passion, said Kellie Poli, who will teach the creative writing class, which will expose the students to poetry, music lyric writing, and other writing styles outside the typical curriculum.

The world cultures class will open students’ eyes to other ways of living they wouldn’t otherwise get to experience, Poli said.

The thought of transitioning the school’s drama club to a class students can now take for credit excited seventh grader Lillian Blanchard, an active drama club participant in the past.

Theater class teacher-to-be Angie Smith, who plans to have her students write a play, on Monday encouraged Poli to consider a theater-creative writing collaboration to stretch the students’ creativity even farther.

The new Innovators Plus class will build on a current Innovators class, in which students tackle projects like the design of buildings and cities, creating models using materials such as interlocking blocks.

The Innovators’ non-traditional class style integrates with other learning opportunities at the school, such as work with robotics, said Thunder Bay eighth grader Asa Blanchard.

Making creativity part of their thought process can lead them toward careers that require a creative brain, such as programming, coding, construction, project management, and teaching, the students said.

The Alpena Public Schools Board of Education on Monday also:

∫ agreed to a one-time waiver of a state test requirement for the Alpena High School class of 2022. Some of this year’s seniors could not take the 11th grade MSTEP – currently a graduation requirement – last year because of complications related to COVID-19. Seniors may take the test this spring but will not be required to do so, the board decided. Students were able to take SAT and ACT tests, APS Superintendent David Rabbideau said.

∫ approved the following bids:

A second phase of bond-funding renovation projects at Hinks and Sanborn elementary schools and Thunder Bay Junior High School totaling $4.7 million, with an additional $700,000 in ESSER-funding projects for the same schools;

Refuse and recycling removal through June 2025, granted to GFL Environmental;

A robotics welding learning system for the Career Technical Education program for $72,500 from Integrated Systems Technologies;

Auto supply cabinets and tools for the CTE automotive program totaling $43,300 from Snap-On Industrial Tools.

∫ approved the hiring of several certificated staff members, including a second grade teacher and a high school art teacher. APS hired 22 staff members in the past month, a spokeswoman said.

∫ A group of students from Alpena High School’s Career Technical Education program took second place in a state competition for student-created virtual enterprises and will soon travel to New York to represent their virtual corporation, 45North, on a national level, they told the board.

∫ Sanborn students in oversized heart-shaped glasses told the board about the special adults who keep their school running, from grandparent volunteers who offer the extra hugs students sometimes need to the school custodian, who “cleans everything but the ceiling,” one student said.