By FULLER ROYAL

When Whiteville High School’s freshmen arrive on campus next fall, they will be part of an experimental new concept at the school – the freshman academy.

Created and implemented by Talent Development High Schools (TDHS), the WHS Freshman Academy will be the first of a series of WHS-based academies that will change the model of the school.

Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Social Organization of School is the creator of TDHS.

The TDHS representative assigned to WHS, Matthew Wernsdorfer, and WHS Principal Kyle Ramey presented an update on the program to the Whiteville City Schools Board of Education last week.

“Each piece of this program is implemented to eventually raise student achievement,” Ramey said. “We have located the freshman academy on the entire second story of the main building.”

There, all of the freshmen will attend three-fourths of their classes, including all of their core classes such as math and English. All of the freshmen-level teachers will be housed on that floor.

Ramey said that the students must pass five end-of-course tests at WHS and that freshman academy will help ensure that.

“Passing a class is one thing,” Ramey said. “Passing the EOC is another.”

Ramey said that next year’s freshman class would be the first to start developing a senior portfolio and project, a requirement for graduation. Also required will be a community service project.

Ramey said that a $300,000 grant awarded the school last year is underwriting the project.

The school chose the Johns Hopkins TDHS model because it was the best they had seen.

Wernsdorfer, from Baltimore, Md., has taught the TDHS model in Brooklyn, N.Y. and Washington, D.C.

“I have seen this from quite a few angles,” he told the board.

He said that school boards across the country are asking themselves, “Why don’t students succeed?”

He said that every high school would love for all of its freshman class to come in knowing how to read and do math. That’s not always the case.

There is also great concern that one in four students are dropping out of school. He said that most students quit after ninth grade but in the Whiteville system, it’s a slower hemorrhage of students that lasts into their senior year.

At WHS, the freshman academy will have three teacher teams.

“Everyone teaching freshmen will only teach freshmen,” he said. “All incoming ninth-graders will take freshman seminar.”

Freshman seminar is a course offered during the first semester designed to address problems that ninth-graders encounter with a new school – anxiety, lack of study skills and lack of test-taking skills, among others.

In-depth sessions use a variety of innovated and traditional teaching techniques including long-range projects, cooperative learning activities and reflective journal writing.

This helps students at the end of the year when they choose a career academy. These career academies have not yet been designed, but will be in place for the start of the 2007-08 school year.

Wernsdorfer said it takes about two years for the teaching teams to begin moving at top speed.

“You have already designed the master schedule for your freshmen academy next year,” he said. “And there are no extra teachers required.”

One of the conditions of the grant is that no additional employees could be hired. Whichever program WHS went with must be self-sustaining after the grant money dries up.

Freshmen who are weak in math will take Transition to Advanced Mathematics (TAM). TAM’s five units help bring students up to speed for their Algebra I class, to be taken during the second semester and taught by the same teacher.

For students weak in English, Strategic Reading will be taught the first semester, followed by English I, again with the same teacher, to maintain continuity.

Ramey said his faculty has bought into the program and is looking forward to seeing how it works.

“As a team, we have shared with the eighth-graders at Central Middle School this concept,” he said. This was accomplished through an orientation and then class registration at the high school.

“I think we have done an excellent job in communicating with parents and students,” he said.

Ramey said that Assistant Principal Ernie Gaskins would be assigned to the freshman academy, as will one of the school’s counselors.

“We’re ahead of the game,” Ramey said, noting that the only anxiety right now is how the schedule will work out once the rising freshmen register.

Freshman academy committee chairman Susan Smith outlined the additional orientation sessions planned to introduce the freshman class to its new surroundings, including a Pack Pride Day in August.

Superintendent Danny McPherson said that schools are returning to smaller learning communities and the freshman academy is WHS’s first step toward that goal.

He said that nationally, personalities like Oprah Winfrey and Bill and Melinda Gates are actively pushing for major reforms in the schools.

School board member Carlton Prince asked about the status of the career academies.

Wernsdorfer said that at the end of the freshman year, the ninth-graders would take an aptitude test to determine their interests.

“Students have to articulate well what their interests are,” he said. They might create a PowerPoint presentation to explain what they want to do.

“At the end of their freshman year, they will have spent time musing about their post high school plans,” he said. “They will decide which academy they want to attend.”

In 2007-08, the upper grades in the high school will be divided into four or five academies, each with a particular pathway toward graduation.

Wernsdorfer said the number of students in each academy needs to remain even so there will be enough teachers to cover each.

“We have had some conversation on this,” Ramey said. “An arts academy would be wonderful.”

He said that students select something they are interested in and want to spend two years involved with – academies for technology, world studies, math and the sciences and sports and sports medicine.

“The staff at WHS understands the concept,” he said. “Rather than serve students at random, we will offer something they want and we will grow and nurture them in those career academies.”

Wernsdorfer said that the academy concept helps prevent teenagers from choosing classes based on social pressure rather than intellectual rationale.