DPS to offer community college classes

By Chastity Pratt Dawsey
Detroit Free Press Education Writer

Detroit Public Schools will offer community college classes at its high schools starting next month, school officials announced today.

Wayne County Community College District and DPS will partner in the Concurrent Enrollment program that will allow eleventh- and twelfth-grade students to earn credit for one to two college courses per semester – or up to12 credits per year. The classes will be held starting next Monday, Feb. 1 by college instructors at the high schools after regular classes.

Tuition will be $50 per three-credit course – compared to an average of $240 for WCCCD courses offered on WCCCD campuses, school officials said.

Robert Bobb , the emergency financial manager for DPS, said the program was designed to create a mindset for college. “There is nothing more significant,” he said. DPS has a high school graduation rate of about 59%.

Curtis Ivery, the chancellor of WCCCD, agreed, saying offering college courses to DPS students also will “create a culture of expectations.”

In 2007, DPS started a middle college program at Kettering High where students can earn both a high school diploma and a health care-related associate’s degree from WCCCD one year after they would ordinarily graduate from high school. The first graduates of that program – 20 students - are expected to earn their diplomas and degrees in June, according to WCCCD.

The course offerings for the city-wide Concurrent Enrollment program will include classes such as green technologies, health care, information technologies science, engineering, math, English, sociology, anthropology, psychology and speech and humanities, though each high school will not necessarily offer all of those classes.

DPS students must have a 2.5 grade-point average or higher, no major discipline problems and fill out an application at their high school to participate.

WCCCD also offers courses to high school students outside Detroit at its western campus, Ivery said.

Source: http://www.freep.com/article/2011012...ollege-classes

This is not new news. We've been offering dual enrollment for quite a few years now.

We had that back when I was in High School way-back in the 1980's!

Many More State colleges and universities should be ‘adopting’ Detroit city schools and managing them with specialized curriculums such as medical science, physics/engineering, information technology, accounting/finance, and more [[with the understanding that upon graduation they would already have some transferable college credits.)

Sounds like a good way to charge for AP courses.