NEISD, UTSA start dual-credit program

North East Independent School District will offer a dualcredit magnet program starting this fall for high school students who want to be teachers.

Under a partnership with the University of Texas at San Antonio, students in their junior and senior years at MacArthur University Prep, or MacUP for short, will be able to earn up to 24 college credit hours by taking classes at UTSA’s downtown campus. They will pay about $200 a semester for classes that would cost them closer to $13,000 as university students.

The program is designed to foster the interests of aspiring educators and, by preparing them to be “full-fledged university students,” to help build a strong pipeline from high school to college, said MacArthur High School Principal Pete Martinez.

“What we’re hoping to build is not just a magnet program but something that’s going to change what we’re doing educationally,” Martinez said. “What we want to do is actually have that bridge that walks them right into the university life.”

The first cohort, open to up to 40 students, will be made up of students from MacArthur and other North East ISD schools who will be sophomores in the fall. They will prepare to enroll at UTSA by studying and taking the Texas Success Initiative Assessment, which helps deter- mines students’ readiness for college coursework.

Once they enter their junior year, they will take a blend of high school and college classes. They will start their school day at the UTSA Downtown Campus, then be bused back to their high school campuses for the rest of their coursework. The college credits will be for core classes that are “highly transferable,” Martinez said.

If MacUP is successful, the district could later explore ex- panding the idea to other subject areas, such as law enforcement or medicine, he said.

In March, the charter network Southwest Preparatory School announced a similar partnership with Texas A&M University-San Antonio. That early college high school program will allow students to earn up to 60 credit hours while attending classes on the A&MSan Antonio campus.