Parkers Chapel High School to test ʻacademiesʼ
PARKERS CHAPEL — Parkers Chapel High School is creating a specialized diploma track, Academies at PC, that would give juniors and seniors the opportunity to gain industry experience, college course experience and a designation on their diplomas.
The academies wouldn’t alter the school’s enviornment for the students, PCHS Principal Seth Williams said.
They could study in the Academy of Humanities, STEM Academy and Academy for Global Leadership.
“The global leadership (academy) is anything like business, economics and even like management. Humanities would be anything in the arts — English, drama, art, music — and STEM (includes) computer science, math and science in even more specialized areas,” he said.
Students would have to apply for the program, get letters of recommendation and be interviewed by a committee before joining an academy. A student’s focus area
within the Trojan’s academy is like “a mini major in college,” the principal said.
“They have to have three electives in an academy area (and) two AP courses or concurrent college credit courses in an academy area. What we’ll find is more concurrent classes taken because more of those are offered that students are taking online. SouthArk and even UALR are offering their courses next year to us,” Williams said.
“A lot of this will be independent. There’s a capstone portion of this, or like a culminating project, and there’s a time that they’ll have to take an online course that’s self-directed.”
To free up teachers’ time, PC Academy students would take an open courseware class, a self-paced course online provided by an institution for free, and present a portfolio that would be judged against a pass/fail rubric.
The course wouldn’t count toward a students' GPA though, Williams said.
“Most universities have an open courseware site where they have taken their online courses and put them in this site for you to take independently,” he said. “MIT, the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, has a lot of courses. They’re very detailed. They have all of the lecture notes, assignments, quizzes, tests, essay topics, videos, lectures.
"All of this is put into a course and they have very specialized electives.”
The principal said that the best part of Academies at PC is the program’s internship component during the fall semester of their senior year.
“This will allow them to
work with somebody or do a project with a local architect, if that’s something they want to do. It goes beyond what they do in the eighth grade which is like a standard job shadow,” Williams said. “Part of their internship will be doing a project and that will be something that is going to help the community so we want them to figure something out in that area that’s going to give back.”
Though Williams proposed three academies, Parkers Chapel School Board members suggested adding an academy dedicated to technical education in fields like welding, automotive repair and cosmetology.
Brittany Williams may be contacted by email at bwilliams@eldoradonews.com. Follow her on Twitter and like her on Facebook @BWilliamsEDNT for updates on Union County school news.