'Pre-Early College' comes to 11 Duval middle schools
Times-Union
'Pre-Early College' comes to 11 Duval middle schools
http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2015-02-11/story/pre-early-college-comes-11-duval-middle-schools
By Denise Smith Amos
Call it really early college.
Duval Schools and Florida State College at Jacksonville are ramping up efforts to get students ready for college, starting as early as middle school.
Beginning next fall, about 1,100 seventh and eighth graders at 11 Duval middle schools will be put on an early college track. They’ll take some high school courses in middle school, including a college readiness exam in seventh grade, and get their first college-credit-bearing course in 8th grade.
It’s a study skills course that many FSCJ freshmen take now.
The pilot program is a first in Florida, said FSCJ president Cynthia Bioteau.
Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said it’s designed to lure students and parents from magnet or charter schools back to Duval’s typical middle schools.
Magnet schools are run by the district and charter schools are run independently of the district, but both have drained hundreds of students a year away from Duval’s traditional middle schools.
This “Pre-Early College” program is an effort to slow down and maybe halt that trend, or at least retain some of the brightest middle school students.
“We know we have to do a better job offering accelerated programs at our middle schools,” Vitti said, adding he hopes it also gets other students to test out if they’re college material.
Early College programs have been in high schools for at least two decades. They have been known to attract students who are the first generation in their families to go to college, Bioteau said.
There’s also a growing national push to make students and their classes “career and college ready” starting in the elementary grades.
The new middle school program will take it further. It starts first with seventh graders, who’ll qualify by earning close to 3 points or more (out of 5) on the new Florida state reading assessments, which students first take this spring instead of the FCATs.
In seventh grade these students then will take an enrichment reading class that prepares them for the PERT exam, which measures college readiness. If they make 85 percent or better and maintain a 2.5 GPA, then it’s on to 8th grade in the pre-college program, where they take at least three high school level courses (algebra 1, physical science, Spanish 1 or speech and debate) and the college studies course.
The idea is that these students will continue to Duval high schools which also have college-credit courses, such as dual enrollment classes or Advanced Placement.
At Englewood High, for instance, early college students take honors high school and college-credit courses as early as ninth grade. A partnership with Johnson & Johnson includes paid summer internships at its Vistakon plant.
Then, for 11th and 12th grade, those students take courses on FSCJ’s campuses.
Duval already has 9,059 high school students taking dual enrollment classes, Vitti said, an increase of 41 percent over the past two years.
But is 12-years-old is too early to get students pointed at college?
That’s the right age, says school board member Ashley Smith Juarez, a former middle school teacher; Adults can spark a college-going orientation in adolescents easier than in high-schoolers, who may have made up their minds by then.
Destinee Bryant, a 12-year-old seventh grader at Southside Middle, was one of the few students at the pre-Early College announcement Wednesday. She said she’s not afraid of taking high school and college courses years earlier than most of her peers.
“I’m ready now,” she said. “I know what I’m going to do to try to succeed and if you try your best, you may just get to do it.”
Denise Amos: (904) 359-4083