Adapting to a new standard

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ESCANABA - Local schools are working hard to keep kids graduating under the new Michigan Merit Curriculum that applies to students who are freshmen and sophomores this year.

Escanaba Area High School Doug Leisenring said some effects have not been realized yet. Next year, all juniors, nearly 300 students at EAHS, will take chemistry, a school first. The school's current two labs cannot handle that capacity.

"We have never had that many kids take chem," he said. "I have to come up with a way to create a third lab for next year, with the availability of the water and gas lines you need to have a robust chemistry program."

Leisenring and the science teachers are working on creating the third lab for next school year.

Looking at the future of education in Michigan, every student is now required to take the college preparatory classes, like chemistry, whereas before maybe 40 percent took them.

"So we have more kids taking these core classes and that's one of the biggest changes in Michigan in education," said Leisenring. "We are working very hard on helping them understand the more difficult curriculum. These are huge changes for us, the MMC and what we are doing to help kids get through that."

The changes to the curriculum include requiring four years of math, three credits of science - biology, chemistry and physics - as well as four years of English. The requirement used to be two years each of math and science and 3 years of English.

Leisenring said there are ways to grant math credit for courses that have a math component. The school board recently gave him the authority to grant math credit for courses taken by seniors at the ISD because they all contain math components with the exclusion of child care.

"It's also going to be for classes here at the high school," explained Leisenring. "You have to take math or a math-related course in the senior year. Also we're going to do the same things for accounting, personal finance (etc.)."

Leisenring said the math component of courses is what makes them count under the MMC, and personal finance is what it sounds like - teaching kids basic finances like how to balance a checkbook and how credit cards work.

"I'm going to push a lot of kids to look at taking personal finance," he said. "I think it would be great if every high school student took that so they don't rack up $10,000 on pizza and tacos and have to be paying on that for the next ten years."

Gladstone High School is also working on the MMC changes. Principal Brady Downey said they are working on a credit recovery system for current freshmen and sophomores who are not passing the core courses as required.

"What we do is we remove their electives and enroll them back into the core course," said Downey. "We purchased an online credit recovery system called compass learning and I have built a credit recovery lab to house those students."

Downey said GHS is also thinking about implementing differentiated learning.

"What that means is having different levels of instruction, different levels of students in your classroom," he said. "(The goal is) trying to meet the needs of all learners."

Downey said the issue is not just at the high school level, but K-12.

"For the graduating class of 2016 you have to have two credits of a language other than English," he said. "So we are looking at grades three through eight trying to get them a credit and the possibility of teaching a foreign language before high school."

Eighth graders at both schools are also now receiving high school credit if they complete algebra in middle school.

"We want to be flexible and also creative with this," Downey said.

Bark River-Harris school Guidance Counselor Jan Hood said BR-H is making similar steps to Escanaba and Gladstone as far as credit recovery, but they are also interested in smaller class sizes.

"We are trying to add faculty to reduce class sizes but the state budget at this point is making that next to impossible," she said.

Hood said BR-H is attempting to arrange different methods by which students can reclaim credits and starting the education process about the MMC at a lower age.

"We are trying to tell to the junior high and elementary students to be serious from day one," said Hood. "We are also trying to get parents involved by stressing to them what this new curriculum means."

Hall said the new requirements are going to be tough, but the kids will get through them with a little help.

"We know that many of them are going to struggle. We are doing the best we can to get them through, but parents have to help us. Education cannot simply be left up to the schools. It needs to be a community effort," she said. "Everyone is going to have to pitch in and its going to take everyone to get these kids through the new curriculum."