Published 10/21/2025, by Sofia Kwan, Micah Trujillo, and Penny Lubbers
Attention, Walter Reed Students. In the second semester of the 2025-2026 school year, you will be given an elective form to fill out. Your answers on this form will give the counselors an idea of which elective to put on your schedule for the next year. Reed offers many diverse electives to choose from, so don’t be afraid to pick a new one for next year!
Starting in 7th grade, you can unlock several new electives that were unavailable to 6th graders. This includes: leadership, library assistant, yearbook, technical drawing, filmmaking exploration, and ASB. Even more get unlocked in 8th grade!
Have you ever wondered who decides the spirit weeks and all the fun activities held at school? That would be leadership, an elective with Mrs. Hermes in room 218, which is located in the Upper B Building. Brady Malin, a student that has been in Leadership for two years says, “We organize fan events and fundraisers for the school, such as the Rock Paper Scissors Championship and the Breast Cancer awareness grams.” He says that their goal is to “make the school an exciting place to learn”.
In 7th and 8th grade, you can choose to become a library assistant. You will spend a period in the library helping Ms. Fed with many different tasks. Austin Lubbers, an 8th grader in the elective says, “Essentially you get to help Ms. Fed around the library. You do tasks like organize books, clean the library, and help out your peers and other students. In this elective, you learn library skills like how to use the Dewey Decimal System, check out books, and care for them as well. Library services is a great, engaging, and fun elective which is definitely worth a shot trying!”
You can also pick the yearbook class as your elective! This is a very fun period, but requires an application and an interview to get in. As the name suggests, you will help design and create the school's yearbook along with Mrs. Hermes and many other students. Charlie Newberry, a student in yearbook says, “You go around to your assigned classes and take pictures of the students to then put in the yearbook.”
Another choice is the technical drawing elective. This class is taught by our cartooning and animation teacher, Mr. Rogers. This class is taught in room 132, which is located in the C Arcade. This is the class to take if you dream to have a future in a technical drawing field, such as architecture, landscaping, home infrastructure design, theme park design, etc. It is also a good choice for an elective if you wanted to take the class another time or want to take an art class at Reed. The first semester expands on the basics of technical drawing, preparing you for the second semester. In the second semester, you go through the “Imagineering in a Box” project made by Disney Imagineering. This project helps guide you to imagine, design, draw out, and finish a theme park land made by you.