Students shape their lives through everyday choices they make. Family and consumer sciences (FCS) courses help students meet the everyday challenges of personal, family, school, and work life while planning for the future. Students develop core skills — problem solving, managing work and family responsibilities, relating to others, and assuming leadership roles in family, school, community, and work — while exploring practical problems related to the content of each course. FCS courses help students realize the relevence of their academic courses to real life.

Middle School

*Work and Family Life focuses on helping middle school students develop self-responsibility and practical reasoning skills. Includes concerns regarding relating to others, becoming independent, managing resources, and creating a self-identity. Offered at Cuyahoga Falls, Stow-Munroe Falls, Tallmadge, Woodridge.

High School

*Personal Development focuses on taking responsibility for personal development, building relationships with family and peers, managing stress and conflict, and planning for future careers.

Resource Management focuses on managing resources to achieve personal and family goals, making informed consumer choices, creating and maintaining a living environment, selecting obtaining and maintaining clothing, making food choices, and preparing and serving nutritious food.

Nutrition and Wellness focuses on making choices that promote wellness and good health, evaluating and controlling influences on food choices, obtaining and storing food, preparing and serving nutritious meals and snacks, and selecting and using equipment for food preparation.

Family Relations focuses on nurturing human development throughout life, forming one’s own family, building and maintaining healthy family relatiohships, developing positive communication skills, dealing effectively with family stresses, conflicts, and crises.

Parenting focuses on preparing for parenting roles and responsibilities, meeting developmental needs of children and adolescents, using guidance and discpline to promote self-discipline, self-esteem, and socially responsible behavior in children, and building positive parent-child relationships.

*Life Planning focuses on planning for life beyond high school, caring for self and others to ensure wellness, building and maintaining constructive interpersonal relationships and strong functional families, developing strategies for lifelong career management, coordinating personal and career responsiblities.

*Includes units that help sutdents identify their strenghts and interests and look at them in relation to career opportunities. Students analyze career-related decisions in a variety of situations and evaluate the potential impact of those decisions on themselves and others.

All high schools share a common curriculum for these six core courses. However, the names of the course vary from district to district.