Education Week - February 6, 2013 - S6

LESSON LEARNED
as a step forward, not a step back,” he says.
That something was community college courses at a
new school called psja College Career Technology Academy that was separate from the district’s comprehensive
high schools. Those courses, taught largely by faculty
members from South Texas College in nearby McAllen,
would put students on a track to earn credits toward an
associate degree or career certificate, King says. The career academy also provides support to students who need
to prepare for and pass the state high school exit exam
and make up missing high school credits.
King, who already had a strong relationship with the
president of South Texas College from his time in Hidalgo,
drew on that connection to open up the new school for
recovered dropouts in less than two months.
By September 2007, 224 seniors who had left before
graduation agreed to come to the new school, King says.
And three months later, in December, 49 of them had
graduated. By January 2008, the district, with state funding to support its expansion, opened the program to any
district dropout up to the age of 26.
Since the academy opened five years ago, more than
1,000 recovered dropouts have returned and graduated,
and districts across Texas have replicated the model.
One school leader says the results in Pharr-San JuanAlamo have sent a powerful message to the broader
community.
“That recovery school has shown that everyone is going
to get an opportunity to have success. It’s not just reserved
for those who are going to make it whether Mr. King had
ever come here or not,” says Ronnie Cantu, who was
elected to the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo school board two
years ago and is now serving as its president. “These are
young people who would have fallen through the cracks in
many other systems but got a second chance here.”

“I believe that
superintendents have
to be courageous on issues
of race and equity, and the
English-learner achievement
gap is one of those issues.
The responsibility of
English-learners does
not just belong to the
academic department.
It belongs to
everyone.”

Expanding College Access
At the same time that the district was focusing on dropout recovery, it was also attending to an overhaul of the
three comprehensive high schools that, like the career
academy, would offer all students the opportunity to enroll in community college courses and earn at least 12 college credits by the time they graduated from high school.
Parents and some members of the community were
skeptical about the early-college approach at first, Cantu
says. Students and their parents had to be convinced
that extending education beyond high school would have
longer-term payoffs than seeking work as soon as they
graduated.
King and his team consistently argued that giving
students a head start on earning college credits not only
would increase their odds of graduating and going on to
higher education, but would also increase their chances
of finishing with a degree. And it would save them money.
“In a community with as much poverty as we have here,
it can be hard to convince students and their parents to
not go out and get a paying job once you graduate,” the
veteran superintendent says. “But when you show them
how much more they can earn with a degree, and give
them a head start toward earning it in high school when
they don’t have to pay for it, it’s very effective.”
King had established one of the first early-college high
schools in the country in Hidalgo a few years earlier
during his first superintendency, using a grant from the
Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that, as
first proposed, would have offered the dual-enrollment
opportunity to only half the 800 students in the school.
King said he did not want the grant unless the program
would be open to all students, because “if it’s good for kids,
shouldn’t everyone get a shot?” The foundation eventually
agreed.
That all-or-nothing approach is something King still
insists on, Principal Rivas-Garza says, which pushes her
to keep increasing the numbers of students at her high
school participating in dual enrollment. This school year,
she expects at least half her 2,000 students to complete at
least one college-credit-bearing course.
Across the district this school year, about 2,000 high
school students are enrolled in at least one community
college course, King says. He vows to keep pushing hard
until that number gets closer to 4,000 students. “We are
still in the middle of this effort, but I think what we’ve
shown here,” he says, “is that districts and communities
in dire situations can come together and do what’s best
for kids.” n

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EDUCATION WEEK • February 6, 2013

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Education Week - February 6, 2013

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