Changing possibilities is the name of the game at Buncombe County Early College, an innovative high school campus at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College.
Students at the school commit to a five-year program that will simultaneously earn them a high school and associate college degree fully transferable to any school within the University of North Carolina system. All of this is provided at no cost to the students, who are chosen because they are demographically underprivileged or under-represented at the college level.
“I will tell you I am biased and I love our little school,” Principal Meg Turner said. “I love our little school. We have grown it from nothing into something and I think it’s good.”
Now open for its third year, Buncombe County Early College is a part of the new high school initiative known as Learn and Earn schools. The program was birthed from $20 million in grants given by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The autonomous high schools are purposefully designed, with facilities situated on university or college campuses throughout North Carolina. Each school teaches academic rigor and provides viable opportunities to potential future careers through work-based learning experiences.
The school settings are small and intimate. Only 60 students are accepted into each grade level at the Asheville campus.
Schedules for each of the five years vary, as does the course load from year to year. The students at Buncombe County Early College remain within the confines of the high school campus, which takes up the entire top floor of a large building at the community college, during their first and second years of school.
Each class is challenging. The students are taught how to write college-level papers, completing draft after draft as they are encouraged by their teacher to “think and rethink.”
“We provide effective classroom instruction,” said English teacher Donna Chandler. “The small class size is a part of it, but there is also a commitment to help every child grow from where they are — from the weakest student to the strong. The difference is, we try and challenge all of them, whereas a traditional school tries to teach all of them down the middle.”
It’s not just about book learning. “We are rigorous,” Chandler said. “The students are learning real-world problems and how to solve them. They are becoming real creative thinkers. We focus on teaching them the skills they need to be successful in life and college. We are trying to teach the habits of the mind and organization as well as the skills and content. We talk about perseverance, personal responsibility, and high-quality work.”
There is a payoff because it prepares the students for their dual enrollment in college during their third year. “We tell the students to keep their eyes on the prize and get that college degree,” Turner said. “By the end of their fifth year they will have 66 college credit hours completed. And, it’s all free to them. Their parents light up knowing that two years of college are paid for by the state.”
Third-year student Megan Yoshida said the program is exactly what she needed to go into her family’s restaurant business. “I love the college classes and it’s definitely a jump start to what I want to do,” she said. “I feel challenged and I’m very thankful that I got accepted here. The teachers are great. They are different from other schools I’ve attended. They push us. It’s benefited me and I’m learning a lot from it.”
“My mind has been stretched since I’ve been here and I’ve found that knowledge is more than book work,” second-year student Kiara Jones said. “Before I came here I was all about getting the work done. Now it’s about thinking. It’s enriching. Now it’s about understanding my work. It’s the process of doing the work.”
Turner said although the school is succeeding, it’s had difficulties to overcome.
“Any time you are carving something out from scratch you’re going to have some growing pains,” she said. “In the first year we started with 60 kids and lost 11 of them in the first year. We quickly realized that we are not set up to deal with kids who have high-risk, socially unacceptable behavior. My staff and teachers needed to have lots of conversation and dialogue to refine the student recruitment process and clarify the kinds of students we were going to serve.”
Karen Welsh is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.