High Schools Join Community College Push

Reformers are touting community colleges as a remedy for an array of high school ills--from overcrowding to that age-old malady known as “senioritis.”

Programs that allow students to attend community colleges while still in high school have been growing more popular nationwide in recent years, and have been expanding especially quickly in Los Angeles. Now, officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles Community College District are putting the final touches on a plan to encourage many more high school students to take community college classes.

The aim is to ease crowding in high schools, make college vocational classes available to younger students, give ambitious students a way to start college early and discourage students from slacking off in the last year of high school, overcome by senioritis.

Community college classes could also nudge less ambitious students to consider college by giving them early exposure to college-level academics, advocates argue.

“We have 70% of our students at poverty level, and it’s really hard for them to think ahead about going to college,” said Julie Korenstein, a member of the Los Angeles school board. “But if they can complete some course work, and walk into college with 12 units already completed, it would be that much less difficult and expensive.”

Boards of both the school and college districts have passed resolutions pledging to expand and promote concurrent enrollment of high school students in community colleges. The two districts are working together to create a simple, standardized plan that would encourage students to blend the final years of high school with the first years of college.

Los Angeles Unified high school students would be able to choose from a pre-approved menu of classes at any of Los Angeles’ nine community colleges at no cost and receive credit in both systems. The plan would replace a patchwork of programs and policies that now exists in the two districts.

The districts’ efforts seek to turn a grass-roots trend into policy: In recent years, the number of Los Angeles high school students taking community college courses has been growing rapidly. At least 3,000 Los Angeles high school students are said to have enrolled in Los Angeles community colleges last year, and the numbers have more than doubled at some college campuses.

Tamika McDonald, a 17-year-old senior at Manual Arts High School, has already taken an English class and two math classes at Los Angeles City and Southwest colleges.

She did so partly because she was growing restless at Manual Arts. “Some of the classes here are very rudimentary,” she said. “And the teachers--it’s weird--I go to an inner-city school, and sometimes I feel the teachers dumb the classes down.”

A few students complete as much as a full year of college by the time they graduate from high school, and are able to finish a bachelor’s degree just three years after high school, saving on college costs, said Elena Paul, college counselor at Taft High School.

Others get a jump on career goals. Guerline Pierre, 17, another senior at Manual Arts, said the classes she has taken at Trade-Technical College will allow her to earn a certificate in licensed vocational nursing within a year of graduating from high school. She will then pursue a bachelor’s degree to become a registered nurse while working.

“I will be done with my prerequisites when I graduate,” she said. “Basically, I like to be ahead. I am very ambitious, and when I have the time, I busy myself with something important.”

California has allowed high school students to enroll in community colleges since the 1960s, and many other states have programs dating back years. In Florida, for example, a statewide concurrent enrollment program has been growing rapidly, and 25,000 students now participate each year.

The programs are not universally lauded. In Washington state, high schools lose state funds when students enroll in community colleges, to ensure that taxpayers are not paying twice to educate the same students. For this reason, the program has been controversial, said Ron Crossland, associate director for Washington’s community and technical college board.

In California, neither system loses money, but the State Board of Education last spring moved to limit the potential for similar controversy by placing a cap on the number of high school students allowed to participate. The limit was set at 5% per grade level, but it has not been enforced.

Officials with the school district and colleges are still working out the final details of the plan, which may be in place by the middle of the next school year, they said.

One question is whether college-level academic courses would offer weighted grades, as Advanced Placement courses do. High school students who earn A’s in Advanced Placement classes earn 5 grade-points instead of 4, which helps to boost grade-point averages and therefore chances for admission to good colleges.

Currently, officials at some high schools, such as Taft in the west San Fernando Valley, report that they weight college courses the same way. So far, at Manual Arts, officials say they do not.

Broadening access to Advanced Placement courses through the community colleges could help address an issue raised by the ACLU last year in a class-action lawsuit. The suit alleged that black and Latino students were denied equal access to prestigious universities because their schools do not offer as many Advanced Placement courses as schools with predominantly white students.

Los Angeles Community College Chancellor Marshall Drummond says the system will be more fair if standardized districtwide.

Because current rules and practices vary so much, students don’t have the same opportunities, and are often uncertain about whether the classes they take will count toward graduation, he said. In a couple of cases, Drummond said, students have even earned community college degrees while in high school, but were later told the credits would not count toward their high school diplomas.

The proposed plan “levels the playing field. It gives everyone the same rules,” he said.