Commentary: Expanding the reach of early college
August 29, 2013 - By Janet H. Mason, Superintendent, Rutherford County Schools
Even before the first students arrived in August 2005, Rutherford Early College High School was already intended to be larger than itself. We recognized that its greatest value to our rural school district was in pioneering approaches to high school education that would excite students about learning by challenging them with rigorous, engaging instruction and by luring them into college courses before they'd even had the chance to think about dropping out of high school.
Eight years later, REaCH -- as we call our early college -- has lost only one student as a dropout. The school's graduation rate in each of the last four years has exceeded 95 percent. Fully half of all graduates through 2012 earned an associate degree from Isothermal Community College while still in high school. Last month, all but a few members of the class of 2013 finished their high school careers with either an associate degree or two years of college credit.
Even as good as those results are, though, they are not good enough. We envisioned that REaCH would be a catalyst for innovation in our school district's three traditional high schools. We stated that intention in the first paragraph of our original grant proposal for the school, and we meant it. After I led the school's grant proposal and early design, our district's superintendent at that time assigned me to a principalship -- not at the early college but instead at one of our three traditional high schools. Her charge to me was, Go there, and make things happen. Shake it up, and we'll begin to transform our traditional high schools in all the ways we expected REaCH to trigger.
So, when North Carolina New Schools invited Rutherford County Schools to join an initiative aimed at applying early college strategies to traditional high schools, we didn't hesitate. Now, all three of our traditional, comprehensive high schools participate in the program called North Carolina Investing in Rural Innovative Schools.
More students want the kind of opportunities that the early college offers. More students need and deserve those kinds of opportunities. Too often, as principal of East Rutherford High School, I faced students and parents who envisioned early college benefits that I simply couldn't match at the traditional high school.
I couldn't guarantee high school graduation with an associate degree or provide the kinds of internships and unique opportunities available in the early college environment. Many of our parents want their high school children to be able to earn an associate degree or otherwise gain some college experience at no cost because, like many other counties, ours took a tremendous hit during the economic downturn, putting postsecondary opportunities even farther from their financial reach.
The simple reality is that we're not going to end up having early colleges available to every high school student in North Carolina. That's why I want to create those kinds of powerful experiences in the traditional high school setting. I want to be able to tell parents and students, "You didn't get into the early college, so let's highlight and leverage the positive features of a traditional school." Let's break free from the chains of the traditional high school structure that has held us back so that we can introduce and make available powerful early college opportunities to all our high school students. The rural schools initiative is helping to empower that kind of school transformation for high school students in Rutherford County.
For all our efforts aimed at dropout prevention and graduation success, ensuring access to college courses for more students is a strategy that works. I've seen students whom I considered potential dropouts energized and strengthened by experiences in college courses. From the moment they earned an Isothermal Community College credit on their transcripts, our conversations with them fundamentally changed. No longer were we operating in the mode of dropout prevention; instead, we were focused on postsecondary opportunities. The high school graduation battle was already won when students began to envision a postsecondary future beyond high school graduation, and I've come to recognize that the most proactive form of dropout prevention is helping a student earn even one college credit.
As a result, we've shifted from talking about dropout prevention to talking about community colleges, universities, and trade schools. As we focus on the future beyond high school, we begin to make the question, "Are you going to finish high school?" an irrelevant one for our students. Empowered by a vision for educational attainment beyond high school, and armed with college credits, our students will be better equipped than ever to succeed in high school, and to reap the benefits of access to early college experiences they so much deserve.
