Plans Underway to Establish Freshman Academy at DCHS

Plans are in the making to establish a Freshman Academy at DeKalb County High School, possibly starting with the 2007-2008 school year.
Supervisor of Instruction Carol Hendrix says the purpose of the Freshman Academy is to help first time high school students make the transition.” The freshman year has never been easy for students. Research shows that among high school students, 9th graders have the most difficult time with academics and transitioning into a new environment. Research has also shown that the best way to solve this problem is for freshmen to transition into a small learning community, specifically a freshman academy. Freshman year has also been identified as a year that students have the greatest problems with the greatest possibility of failure and risk of not being promoted to the next grade and eventually dropping out of school.”
“The concept of the freshman academy is relatively simple. The academy operates as a school within a school as it will operate in DeKalb County High School. Students are grouped together to take core courses with the same group of teachers increasing the support received from those teachers.”
“Students will have the advantage of a different bell system, a different lunch schedule, and they will have all their classes in one specific area in the building. Students will attend all extracurricular activities such as band, basketball, baseball, etc along with the other student population. We’re hoping clubs and events will also be developed for students in the freshman academy. This will include all first time students at DCHS if we implement it this next year.”
“This past year and the two years previous, a team from this county visited some of the freshman academies in the state and we decided that this would really be good for our school.”