When I was in high school in the 80's, sex ed wasn't its own class; it was a unit in biology class. The required courses (over four years of high school) were English, math, social studies (history mostly), science, and two years of physical education. Anyone who wanted to go to college would also take at least two years of a foreign language because the colleges all required that. Electives were things like music, art, home economics (cooking and sewing), shop (woodworking), auto mechanics, typing (yes, it was still a class in the eighties and most kids never learned how to type before high school because nobody had computers at home), psychology, economics, etc. We had seven class periods per day, so there was a lot of room for electives in addition to the core classes.
Journalism would be an elective--the journalism class participants would be the kids who wrote and edited the school newspaper, and there would be kids from all four grades in the same journalism class. BTW, the rules about freedom of the press don't apply to high school newspapers to the same degree that they do to adult newspapers.
