Local & State Headlines

Academies could cut dropout rate

• State officials look at career academies as a way to cut down on the number of high school dropouts.

Dave Williams

CONYERS — Some of Pete Brannan’s students at Rockdale Career Academy don’t know what they want to do after high school.

Others are already planning careers as engineers.

There’s something for both in Brannan’s manufacturing class, which combines the technical know-how students might need later on a production line with the academic skills others will need for college.

“One of my jobs here is to help them select and eliminate,” said Brannan, who began his 20th year as a teacher last week. “Whatever they’re interested in, they can pursue further.”

For students, it’s just plain more fun than sitting at a desk in a traditional classroom all day.

“It’s more hands-on,” said one of Brannan’s students, who could not be identified under a Rockdale County Public Schools policy, as he bent over a mockup of an assembly line that uses robots. “That’s how I learn best.”

A lot more Georgia high school students soon will have an opportunity to mix career training with academic instruction.

As this school year gets under way across the state during the next week to 10 days — Dougherty County public schools open Tuesday — Georgia boasts six “career academies” established by their local school systems as charter schools.

The General Assembly this year authorized $1.5 million in operational grants and $15 million in construction funds to launch up to five more, beginning with the 2008-09 term.

Interested school systems have until the middle of September to apply for the money, and the selections will be announced a month later.

“They’re not inexpensive, whether they’re remodeling an old (school building) or trying to get one going,” said Lucy Phillip, executive director of partnerships for the state Department of Technical and Adult Education, which is running the program. “The (state) funding is just enough to kick-start the process.”

ANTI-DROPOUT STRATEGY

Georgia education policy makers see career academies as a way to help shrink an unacceptably high dropout rate, along with a program launched by Gov. Sonny Perdue to put graduation coaches in the middle and high schools and an overhaul of the high school career, technical and agricultural education curriculum being undertaken by the state Department of Education.

“The No. 1 reason kids drop out of school is that they believe the things they’re learning aren’t relevant,” said Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, who led the push for the program in the Legislature. “These career academies connect the dots to how their education leads to a real job.”

The vast array of real jobs that are out there after high school or college is readily apparent to the roughly 1,300 students who attend Rockdale Career Academy.

Every other school day, they travel from their home high school to RCA, where they can choose career training in fields from nursing to culinary arts to information technology.

Marketing students helped design a coffee shop at the school, budding emergency medical technicians learn inside the patient compartment of an actual ambulance, and there’s an on-site pre-kindergarten staffed by early childhood education students.

RCA began operating a year ago in a sparkling new 165,000-square-foot building at a local industrial park, built with $22 million in special-purpose local-option sales tax money approved by Rockdale voters.

“Almost every other (career academy) in the state is renovated,” said Tim Melvin, RCA’s chief executive officer. “Being newly built, we didn’t have to compromise the quality of instruction to fit the space.”

Brannan said students act differently when they come to RCA, more focused on what they’re learning.

“They don’t seem to treat it the same way,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the newness or that it doesn’t look like a school.”

PARTNERSHIP ROLES

It’s no coincidence that RCA looks more like a college than a traditional high school. Career academies are partnerships between school systems and local colleges. RCA students are able to take courses that offer credit either at DeKalb Technical College or Georgia Perimeter College.

Local businesses also are part of the process.

Melvin said RCA worked with the local chamber of commerce to tailor its course offerings to meet work-force needs in the area.

Phillip said the state will be looking for similar relationships between the new career academies and local businesses.

“We want to see when the applications come in that they’re focusing on career pathways that are needed in their community,” she said.

Since RCA is only a year old, it hasn’t had a chance to establish a track record.

The model the Rockdale school and others are looking to is the Central Education Center in Newnan, which began operating seven years ago and is the oldest career academy in Georgia. It boasts a graduation rate of 98 percent.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Melvin said. “To participate, students have to express an interest. That makes a difference in that kind of statistic.”

Thus far, most of Georgia’s career academies have set up shop either in small cities like Rome and Dalton or outer suburbs of Atlanta like Newnan and Conyers.

Melvin suggested that transportation costs may have discouraged officials in larger metro school systems like Gwinnett and Cobb counties from seeking to open career academies.

But Cagle said he expects the concept will take root in rural south Georgia with the coming round of grants.

“We’re getting a lot of interest from the southern part of the state, where two or three counties are coming to us saying, ‘We want to create a career academy for this region,’” he said.

It’s uncertain how many of the schools approved in the upcoming round of grants will be ready to open next fall.

Phillip said school systems interested in renovating existing space could open a year from now. However, projects involving new buildings would take longer, she said.

“We’re getting far more applicants than we’re going to be able to take this year,” Cagle said. “This is going to be a long-term initiative.”

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