Due to a lack of teachers qualified to teach self-defense this year and a change in schedule, self-defense will no longer be taught traditionally as it has been in the past. 

Similar to last year, P.E. units switched to four-week increments where students stay in the same class with the same teacher the whole year. Due to this schedule change, there is no way for the three qualified teachers who previously taught the class — Luke Zavala, Diane Taylor and Terri Greene — to do so this year. 

Some students like junior Zoe Stephens are concerned they will not be able to gain the valuable experience of taking self-defense. 

“If it was included it could provide valuable life skills for people later in life to protect themselves, to protect other people,” Zoe said.

A senior, Yannik Leuz, took the self-defense unit in the past and thinks it is a class all students should take.

“I would support it in general,” he said. “I think self-defense is an important life skill.”

Although there will no longer be a designated self-defense class, the P.E. department still wants to teach students the fundamentals of self-defense, particularly the mental side, Mr. Budeselich said. In this way, every student can get some exposure to self-defense unlike how only a select few got it in the past. 

P.E. department chair Scott Budeselich said that teachers saw a lot of benefits with keeping students for the whole year. He said that in particular when it came time to teach Health 10 around the end of the school year, it was much easier to talk about difficult subjects because students built relationships with each other and their teachers.

By next year, all P.E. teachers will now go through training to teach self-defense as well as other specialty areas, such as yoga and fencing, that most Lab P.E. teachers don’t teach.

“It will be a unit that will be in place every year, ” Mr. Budeselich said. “It used to be every other year, and it was only offered one time, and if you weren’t one of the 24 kids that got that class, then you didn’t get it at all. I think in the long run, that’s why we made some of these changes.”