nothin SCSU Brings Its Classes Into High Schools | New Haven Independent

SCSU Brings Its Classes Into High Schools

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Carol Birks and Joe Bertolino sign partnership agreement.

High-schoolers will now be able to take real college courses right inside their high schools.

That’s the result of a new partnership between New Haven Public Schools and Southern Connecticut University that was inked on Thursday morning inside Hillhouse High School’s Floyd Little Athletic Center.

Currently, through the College Beyond College program, close to 50 top-performing high-school students travel to the Southern’s campus for tuition-free seminars. But starting next year, for the first time, Southern will let students take those courses right within their high school.

The tuition-free classes will be taught either by professors who are already on the SCSU faculty or by high-school teachers who are qualified enough to become SCSU adjuncts. Officials said they’re not sure yet how many courses will be offered at each school or in what subject area.

President Bertolino: We want to be accessible.

Our goal is to ensure that children in this community aspire to access to higher education — preferably at Southern, but more importantly that they aspire nonetheless,” said Joe Bertolino, Southern’s president since 2016. We consider that our mission and part of our social-justice values. We’re excited to partner in many new ways with the city. We are the public university of New Haven, and we will continue to be in and of the community.”

Bertolino announced a number of other city initiatives: The university will offer free on-campus housing to 10 students through the New Haven Promise scholarship program. It will offer $200,000 in scholarships to local grads. Six students in social work will help the New Haven Housing Authority help families in West Rock with truancy, financial literacy, and other matters. And faculty will start doing more workshops at Newhallville schools and hold a career day at Common Ground High School.

The partnership came together after a recent Youth Summit at SCSU, said Terricita Sass, the university’s associate vice-president for enrollment management. She said administrators started asking what the city’s teens needed.

Superintendent Birks: This will save our kids cash.

Superintendent Carol Birks, who herself took college classes at Fairfield University when she was enrolled at Bridgeport Public Schools, said that she wanted more New Haven students to have a chance to experience college before they go on a campus to figure out what they like and what they want to do.”

She added that those experiences could save students from the burden of a hefty bill” from four years college tuition.

Dayana Lituma-Solis, Daniela Flores, Hannah Providence and Diara Ortiz-Diaz.

Several students who’ve taken classes at Southern said that it gave them a chance to learn more about specialized fields that go well beyond the usual high-school curriculum.

For instance, Ciara Ortiz-Diaz, a junior at The Sound School, said that her interest in public health led her to sign up for a wellness course about personal health and its environmental determinants. It challenged me to become a better version of myself,” she said.

Daniela Flores, a junior at Wilbur Cross High School, said she’s taking high-level music classes that have given her a head start” and taught her life skills like balancing a heavy schedule.”

And Hannah Providence, a senior at Cross who’s taken nine classes at different colleges throughout the city, said classes taught her how to read research and how to use Excel, which she currently needs for her job at Yale University.

At 15, when I was sitting in my first macroeconomics course, surrounded by all these adults, I thought, this is amazing being around all these people investing time and money and effort into changing their lives,” Providence said. I jumped at the chance.”

While the new program to teach inside the city’s schools has its tradeoffs, like not being around other adults, officials said they see it as a bridge” for students who might not be ready to be the only teenager in a seminar.

They don’t have the pressure while they are in high school, but they are still getting the content” of a college course, Sass said. They could take some classes and say, I’m ready to go to the big school when I’m a little older.’ It will expand it, because we know that transportation is still a major barrier for students to get here on campus.”

At the end of the press conference, President Bertolino offered the students a $1,000 scholarship if they decided that they liked the classes at Southern enough to want to matriculate there.

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