Wood students get early taste of college
Hundreds of Will C. Wood High School students will graduate Friday and many will attend college in the fall.
About 30 of these students already got a head start through the Vacaville Early College High School program, where Wood students can take classes at Solano Community College as early as freshman year and receive college credits.
What's more: Seven students now have Associate of Art degrees.
Faith Clark, Jax Dobrei, Hailey Freestone, Hailey Gillett, Angelica Gosvener, Laila Gunderson and Tarah Lopez all received AA degrees in liberal studies, but they were walking away with more than that: college readiness, credits and an eased financial burden.
The program, a partnership between SCC and Vacaville Unified School District, allows students to enroll in a tuition-free program where they take courses either online or at one of SCC's three campuses and earn credits. While not all students receive AA degrees at the end, seven did, the highest number in the program's nineyear history.
Several students were enticed by the ability to take college courses early without having to worry about tuition.
“Tuition is expensive, so I wanted to get two years out of the way and save two years of tuition,” Gillett said.
Gillett also said it was an opportunity to expand her options of what to do in the future.
Freestone said the lack of tuition was very beneficial as she went through the program and will help her afterward. “I didn't even realize it was that helpful in the beginning, but now that I actually am signing up for things, it's really helpful,” she said.
Another reason why students enrolled in the program was to free up their schedules, especially at the end when they could have enough credits to take only three classes at Wood.
“Even though it was more work, it allowed me to loosen up my schedule at Wood and allowed me to take more personal responsibility in what I want to study and what I wanted to do,” Dobrei said.
For students with afterschool jobs such as Gunderson, who worked at Burger King and Noodles & Company, the program allowed for a work/school balance.
“It allowed me to work at my job a lot more,” she said.
That is not to say the program didn't have its challenges. Gillett said it was difficult when she started the program at 14 and was on a campus filled with adults.
“There would be people in their 50s in our class,” she said. “You felt really little. You felt like you did not belong whatsoever.”
The material, Gillett said, also provided a bit of academic sticker shock.
“I have a freshman level of English, and I was supposed to be writing college level essays?” she said. “It was a big learning curve.”
Then in the spring of 2020, students got the ultimate learning curve when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down all school campuses and resulted in a pivot to distance learning.
“It made everything kind of weird, and communication became a little bit difficult towards the middle parts,” Lopez said.
While online classes have always been an option in the program, now they were required to take courses online, which presented its own set of challenges.
“You couldn't talk to (professors) one on one like you would at a high school,” Clark said.
Dubrei said the program taught her to advocate for herself.
“It's not like high school or middle school where you can have your mom call,” she said. “If you have a disagreement with a professor … you are responsible for talking to them about that and taking that step. You can't just ignore it, and learning that I had to do that and how to do that was challenging.”
Other early challenges included budgeting schedules.
“Taking six classes plus a couple other Solano classes was kind of difficult to learn how to manage time that way,” Gosvener said. “You would go through a full school day and then have other commitments and then have to go to Solano and have classes late at night.”
Gunderson said online classes were different from what she was used to.
“It's something that's totally different from middle school, where you can stay after and ask for help,” she said.
However, the challenges were offset by the benefits the program provided, including getting a firsthand look at college at a younger age.
“I already know how the system works, so it's really helpful that I don't have to scramble to learn new information,” Clark said.
Gosvener also said it will help with registering for classes, a stressful process for just about anyone doing it for the first time.
“We had to jump through a lot of different hoops than we would at regular college, but now I get the idea of how it works,” she said. “I don't have to be like every other freshman at the college freaking out, not knowing what to do.”
Lopez said it helped her realize the challenges of college ahead of time and what changes she would need to make beforehand. Overall, she was proud of the experience.
“It really felt like I was able to do something in addition that I wouldn't be able to do without the program,” she said.
Counselor Jamie Russell, who advised students throughout the program, said the pandemic made for a challenging experience but she is proud of the students for pushing through it.
“For it to be during the time of COVID and a pandemic where a lot of kids struggled, I believe they went the opposite direction and really thrived and took advantage of the opportunity,” she said.
Clark will go to Sacramento City College to study dental hygiene, Dobrei will go to UCLA to study bioengineering, Freestone will go to the University of California Davis to study English, Gillett will go to Sacramento State to study social work, Gosvener will go to CSU Monterey Bay to study business, Gunderson will go to Sacramento State to focus on deaf studies and Lopez will go to UC Davis to study neurobiology.