Wednesday, 12/14/05

New Directions Academy in Charlotte has received a $100,000 state grant for advanced online courses and has been selected as a beta testing pilot for online curriculum.

Dickson County is one of eight counties in the state to receive grant money from the $3.4 million awarded through the e4TN program, which offers elementary and secondary students “access to challenging and engaging academic content through an online curriculum aligned to state and national standards,” according to a press release issued by Gov. Phil Bredesen’s office.

“Students should have access to the most advanced classes we can offer,” the governor said in the release. “These grants will allow districts to meet the demands for rigorous learning opportunities across the state and I’m pleased we’re able to award funds to these eight counties so they can expand the access to online learning in Tennessee.”

Karen Willey, behaviorist at New Directions Academy and who was a member of the team that wrote the grant, said the program is “virtual school” with the online courses to be completed at the alternative school and will also be used for credit recovery.

“I anticipate our drop-out numbers will go down drastically and our scores will go up tremendously,” Willey said. “Basically what the grant is for is for online learning capabilities.”

Right now, Willey said, the district is looking to the future and that the curriculum will include all of the course work that is currently required of secondary students including foreign languages.

“We’re trying to align first credit recovery with our high school students and then move in to all kinds of course work which includes the foreign languages and vocational education courses,” she said.

Willey said the school owes a debt of gratitude for the grant to Pat Seymour, technology and vocational director for the Dickson County School System.

“He is giving us the support to do that,” she said.

Seymour said he was excited about the grant for several reasons. He said it could carry the possibility of teaching college courses and dual enrollment in the future.

“We think with this distance learning, anything that any student comes in needing they could have,” he said. “Being a pilot on this, once we got it started we could also go to our middle schools and high schools…we could expand our curriculum and not have it cost a fortune to teach it. I really see us maybe teaching some college courses that way, dual enrollment, there are lots of things we could do but we need the experience. I think this will give us the experience to know what we’re doing.”

“This is going to make a whole lot of difference for the students in terms of appropriate course work and to complete their high school diploma, whether they’re working through an adult high school program or whether they’re over here at New Directions,” Willey said. “They have a foreign language course they have to take so it’s going to be very helpful to them as far as that goes. We can offer more course work that’s more appropriate. Since this is aligned with the state and national standards we’re hoping the test scores will fly up because we can offer the course work to them.”

Willey said she and other local teachers will be training others across the state on how to implement the program.

“This is going to be part of what we have to spend our money on,” she said. “We are a beta testing pilot site. They (the state) issued seven awards of $100,000 each. We are given the charge of implementing the program and then training a certain amount within our area. We’re going to go into those school systems and train them.”