In The News: School board approves seven new high school courses

Written by: Seth Gordon, Newberg Graphic 

Additions include two core content subjects and five CTE courses

Newberg School District administrators believe they have taken a major step toward fulfilling their mission to educate all students and prepare them for both college and/or careers after approving seven new courses at Newberg High School for the 2017-2018 school year.

The school board voted unanimously at its Dec. 13 meeting to approve the courses, two of which are in core academic content areas and five that center on career and technical education (CTE).

Stafford Boyd, director of teaching and learning, had previously informed the board that the high school curriculum was already well oriented to prepare student for college, but woefully lacking when it comes to preparing them for career.

He cited a research report conducted by the Education Trust that established a "career-ready" curriculum as one in which students earn three credits in one CTE field by graduation and informed the board that 7.2 percent of 2015 graduates completed a curriculum that was both career- and college-ready.

He told the board at the most recent meeting that the seven courses reflected steps that could be immediately implemented to improve the curriculum and moving forward the approach to course offering will follow the main recommendations made in the national report.

"Especially this notion of making significant change around our structures, which is our courses, the instruction within those courses, making sure that we're really mindful about student aspirations and matching that with what's needed in the real world," Boyd said. "Finally, if we continue to treat the diploma as the end game, we're going to continue the cycle that we're in, so we need to shoot higher than that. Eighty-four percent of our students right now are saying they want higher than that."

Boyd first presented the two core subject courses — Modern World History and Advanced Placement Calculus AB — before NHS principal Kyle Laier introduced the CTE additions.

The only change to Modern World History is that the school will begin requiring it be taken during a student's freshman year, not their junior year, as is the current practice.

"I love this quote from a teacher that 'You don't make the varsity team by taking your freshman year off,'" Boyd said. "That's generally it in a nutshell. From the transition from small schools to comprehensive, we never negotiated that difference from small schools to what we needed for all kids. This is our solution moving forward."

Stafford said there will be a two-year bubble in which freshman and sophomore classes will still take the class as juniors while incoming classes will also take it as freshmen. This will require Laier to overstaff those classes for the next two years, but in the long run it will give juniors more options for electives and freshmen fewer. Incoming freshmen will now take five core academic classes and have three electives, whereas now freshmen take four of each.

The major difference with AP Calculus is that students will not only be taking it for dual college credit, but will also have the opportunity to take the AP test, should they choose to.

"We want to make this shift system wide to do both because the notion that currency of college credit is different for each student, so we need to empower students to do both," Boyd said. "Generally, if you add AP and articulate to AP standards, the rigor of learning is higher for all students, even if they don't take the test."

In presenting the new CTE courses, Laier characterized the high school's current CTE offering as scattered and explained that moving forward they will be organized into more coherent, three-credit pathways that will better prepare students to move into careers directly out of high school.

AP Computer Science A, for example, will be the second-year course in a pathway the school established last year with an introductory computer science class. That course has proven to be a big success, with a total of 119 students in four sections.

"We're assuming that a lot of those students are going to continue on into this second year course and start to create that computer science pathway," Laier said. "We're really excited about that."

Two of the new course offerings — Introduction to Ag Science and Tech and Women in Welding — will represent the beginning of CTE pathways. Newberg already has a popular welding program, but Laier said the new class represents an effort to attract more women into the field and match the demand from industry by holding an all-female course.

"We're extremely lucky to have a new welding instructor that is female herself, so that should be able to help us increase our numbers in that program," Laier said. "Right now, our numbers kind of match industry, which is about 7 percent are female."

The Ag Science course, on the other hand, will be an exploratory course that covers all areas of the subject.

"This is the course you're supposed to have at the beginning," Laier said. "This gives kids an opportunity to see all of those opportunities that are out there in ag science. Adding this course will hopefully attract more kids into it."

The final two courses are both capstone classes meant to serve as the final course for a variety of CTE pathways.

The first, Engineering Design and Development, is a Project Lead the Way course and will involve students from different disciplines working together in large or small teams to identify a real-world problem and create a solution. The course culminates in a presentation of the project to industry professionals.

Laier believes that real-world experience will motivate students and could invigorate senior projects by encouraging more students to work together.

"The stuff that comes out of these courses is pretty amazing and they do it through collaboration," Laier said. "They do it through working with others, which I think is an important piece that is missing in that activity, so this may help kids in that as well."

At his previous school, the Clackamas Academy of Industrial sciences, students also used the course a springboard to launching student businesses.

Both capstone courses will be offered for two credits, meaning students will have two class periods, which will allow them to dig deep into the problems they choose.

Laier also believes the format will help more seniors fill their schedules, which will become an issue for the school after the state changed attendance regulations based on students having full schedules.

In his presentation, Laier described the Integrated Design Studio capstone course as Engineering Design and Design "on steroids."

"Instead of kids selecting a problem then working through a design and prototyping, this is kids taking on a relevant community problem, so actually identifying something in the community that they can engage in partnerships and with businesses to solve that," Laier said. "This would extend over multiple periods, with multiple teachers from multiple disciplines."

Laier said this type of course will not only help motivate and engage students who eschew the traditional academic classroom environment in favor of developing hands-on skills, but because the district now offers credit by proficiency, it can also help those who are not on track to graduate earn credit in core courses through the activities of the project.

He sees the course greatly benefitting students after they graduate as well.

"This has all kinds of great possibilities and moving forward, these are the kinds of activities we want kids engaging in," Laier said. "I know working with the business community the last several years, these are the experiences they want kids to come out with."

Because of the logistics involved in deploying multiple instructors, Boyd said administrators may need to recruit students into the course.

Laier and Boyd addressed concerns from the board about being able to fund the new courses if they are going to overburden the high school's staffing resources, but the pair identified some possible revenue streams and are confident that they will find solutions to get through the transition period because staffing tends to follow students to the classes they choose.

Superintendent Kym LeBlanc-Esparza was fully supportive of the move, lauding Boyd and Lauer for making changes to the school's structure that ambitious enough to set it up for success in the long run.

"If we look at 2020 or 2025, people keep looking at what our current structures look like and look for ways to modify it a little bit," LeBlanc-Esparza said. "The reality is making people look far out enough to say, 'What will the experience for kids need to be like so that we can start getting out of this groupthink that high school looks like this,' so we can be more innovative in how we approach giving kids these new experiences. How do we give kids the 21st-century experiences so that we don't have to sell them on the relevance because they know exactly why they're doing it."