Flex Balances

Academic options nearly limitless with district’s credit flexibility program

FOR AMBITIOUS WESTERVILLE students, medical research and collegelevel mathematics are just as much of an academic option as English and social studies.

In accordance with state mandates, the Westerville City School District last year rolled out its credit flexibility program. Through it, students can vastly expand their educational options with college classes, online learning, internships, testing out of introductory courses or even designing their own curriculum.

“It is allowed to take on its own shape,” says Machelle Kline, director of assessment and alternative education services. “If a student is truly after a piece of knowledge, they can get it with credit flexibility.”

This school year, there are 69 students across the district enrolled in credit flexibility curriculum. There is no age limit on credit flexibility, but the vast majority of participating students are in high school and none of them is in elementary school.

Budget cuts have forced the district to be creative to further the education of students whose interests lie in courses not taught at Westerville, Kline says.

“If they desire to be an engineer, why not give them an experience in middle school or high school to see if that’s what they want?” she says.

Though some college courses come pre-approved, as a general rule the district must approve a student’s plan before he or she is allowed to move forward on it. Each school has a five-person review committee whose makeup depends on the content of the coursework the student is seeking.

To set it up, the student fills out an application and sends it to the committee, which looks it over to see if it meets content standards. Within 10 days, the committee must decide whether to fully or conditionally approve or reject the application. If conditionally approved, the student and his or her parents have another 10 days to revise and re-submit.

Studies show that real-life experiences provide a useful and sustainable way to bolster students’ education, says Karen McClellan, chief academic officer for the Department of Academic Affairs.

“Our students will be able to redefine the classroom experience,” McClellan says.

One option for students looking to get more out of their education is college classes. Westerville has partnerships with Otterbein University and The Ohio State University to expand the horizons of its students and offer them classes Westerville does not teach. “These options are for students who have exhausted the coursework of Westerville City Schools,” Kline says.

Two students are now taking multivariable calculus at Otterbein. One is Phillip Craigmile, a senior at Westerville North High School. Last semester, he took Otterbein’s Calculus 2 course. He took both calculus courses at the district’s Academic Enrichment Center across the street from Westerville South High School.

“I kind of took all the math classes at school already, so it was either a college class or no class at all,” says Craigmile. “Even though I’m still in high school, it will prepare me for college next year without overwhelming me.”

College classes cost money, of course, but often the college will waive the application fee or even the course fee, says Kline.

Another option is testing out of low-level courses for which the student already has demonstrated aptitude. This carries risks – there’s no guarantee the student will ace the test, after all – but it’s a quicker way to get credit for a course so the student can move forward. The score the student gets on the test will appear on his or her report card, just as if the class had been taken.

Online, correspondence and tutorled courses are also options. Sean O’Donnell, a senior at Westerville Central High School, is taking an online AP physics course, and is also in the midst of a research project studying Fc receptors in spleen sinusoidal endothelial cells. He also hopes to take an engineering course at OSU in the spring.

“It’s more real-world experience,” O’Donnell says. “You aren’t put up in a box the entire day.”

Some particularly driven students use the freedom provided by credit flexibility to design their own curriculum. They may work with businesses, nonprofits, government entities or other outside sources to figure out how to best spend their educational time.

In one case, a Spanish teacher at Walnut Springs Middle School worked with two students who already spoke Spanish to design a unique curriculum focused more on literature and culture than on fluency.

Madison McClain, a senior at Central, is working with OhioHealth to study ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) with Jean Halpin, director of operations at OhioHealth’s Westerville Medical Campus, as her mentor. She spends time at home, researching from Central or at the Metro School near the OSU campus, and will be interviewing doctors and getting in- formation from ALS-focused groups. The eventual goal: to determine whether a comprehensive ALS research center in one of the OhioHealth hospitals would be beneficial to central Ohio patients afflicted with the terminal disease.

McClain was the first Westerville student to use the credit flexibility program, taking two art classes in the summer between her sophomore and junior years and then taking a STEM curriculum class last year.

“I think it’s great that a student in high school is able to complete an undergrad- uate research project,” says McClain. “It’s going to be awesome to tell the colleges that I’m applying to, ‘Hey, I’m a senior in high school and this is the second professional research project I’ve conducted.’”

Summer school, once the only option for students who needed additional flexibility in their schedules or to retake a course, is still a possibility in Westerville. The district is one of a limited number in central Ohio to still have full summer offerings.

Interest in a subject not offered by Westerville schools is not the only motivation for students who choose credit flexibility. It’s also a way for a student to fit in a class that is offered, but whose placement in the school day would otherwise conflict with the student’s schedule.

Specially designed curriculum need not take place during the school year, as is the case with Westerville North High School students who will incorporate a six-week trip to Spain over the summer into their Spanish classes by keeping journals, recording video and giving a presentation to Spanish 1 students at the beginning of the 2012-13 school year.

“Just to graduate them isn’t enough,” Kline says. “We have to make sure they’re college-ready and career-ready.”

Garth Bishop is editor of Westerville Magazine. Feedback welcome at gbishop@pubgroupltd.com.