Seven years in, GTECHS offers unique hybrid learning
Three freshmen sit around a table, each with a petri dish in front of them. Clear liquid with blue markings fills the dishes. To an outsider, it could have been an art class.
“This is something we’re learning in biology right now,” said Landry Dean of West Point. “DNA fingerprint stuff.”
“We’re learning how crime scene stuff is being analyzed, like matching blood types,” Alaila Randle added.
Looking over them, a banner on the wall spreads messages of inclusion and acceptance — “Science is Real, Black Lives Matter, No Human is Illegal, Love is Love, Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Kindness is Everything.” That might as well be the collective motto of their school, Golden Triangle Early College High School.
GTECHS, in its seventh year on the Golden Triangle Campus of East Mississippi Community College, allows students to earn a high school diploma and an associate’s degree at the same time.
Class sizes of 15 to 20 students make for personal attention, and a small staff — four full-time teachers, one part-time teacher, a counselor, a secretary and the principal — means everyone really does know everyone else.
EMCC instructors teach college-level courses. During the first two years, they come to GTECHS classrooms to teach. During the third and fourth years, GTECHS students take classes with EMCC students.
The first three classes to go through GTECHS included 110 students who earned associate’s degrees, and 42 percent of students in its first five classes were first-generation college students.
“I think sometimes people think our students all have high test scores and they all have phenomenal grades before they came here, and they all have these perfect discipline records and attendance records, and for some of our kids that is true,” said principal Jill Savely, who has been with the school since it opened for the 2015-16 school year.
“But our students are pretty representative of students that you would find anywhere in this area,” she added
Savely goes further with that point, noting that you can’t always assume a student will succeed or fail based on what you see on paper.
“You could look at a million data points on a student and not be able to tell whether they will be successful here or not,” she said. “What matters is do they want to come here, are they motivated or brave enough to step out of their comfort zone and try something new.”
“The environment here is so welcoming,” said Trinity Robertson, a junior from West Point. “It’s friendly, and you get to be yourself without judgment. And that’s the best thing.”
That is on purpose, Savely said.
“Unless we have to have a rule about something, we don’t,” she said. “We don’t care what color your hair is; we don’t care if your nose is pierced. Just come to school.”
But it’s not just the warm-and-fuzzies that attract students.
“I came here because of the opportunity and diversity,” said Kevin Scales, who gets to school via a 30-to-45 minutes bus ride from Macon daily.
Over the school’s first five classes, students were 63 percent black and 33 percent white, and females outnumbered males 209-92. One way in which the school is less diverse than when it opened is geographic: In the beginning, the school was available to students from the West Point Consolidated, Columbus Municipal, Noxubee County, Starkville-Oktibbeha County Consolidated and Lowndes County school districts.
Three districts pulled out, leaving only the West Point and Noxubee County districts sending students to GTECHS. Of the loss of participating districts, Savely said that in some cases, notably Starkville, there are now “incredible programs” for their students that did not exist when GTECHS was founded.
“We use a lottery system,” she said of the student selection process. “It truly is a random lottery. We typically get more applications than we have seats.”
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Principal Jill Savely has been at the school since it opened in 2015.
One of the attractions was, and is, pragmatic. The opportunity to get a high school diploma and an associate’s degree simultaneously can save time and money.
“It was the opportunity to get your associate’s degree and finish school a little bit earlier,” junior Jada Ivy of West Point said about the attraction of GTECHS. “I’m very interested in the medical field, and that takes a long time. I was interested in making it shorter.”
“I knew it would give me a major head start in my career and in my life,” echoed Kaylee Bauer, a junior from West Point who came to GTECHS from Oak Hill Academy. “I can graduate with people older than me and get into the job field quicker.”
“Our staff works for EMCC,” Savely said. “They are our physical agent. We’re housed here; we’re part of the EMCC umbrella. July 1 is when we actually became part of the physical management of EMCC.
“What that does is it allows our students to remain enrolled in their home schools so they can play sports. They can be on the debate team. If there was an activity that they wanted to do at their home school they could do that if it doesn’t interfere too much with what we do here.”
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“I show that I’m working hard for my grades,” aspiring physical therapist Zyiah Lane said. “I actually earned them.”
Freshmen take one college course at a time; their older peers’ schedules are dominated by college courses, such as algebra, world civilization II and general psychology.
Bauer’s love for math developed after she arrived at GTECHS.
“When I came here, I figured out that I like math a lot more,” she said. “The teachers are very helpful here and have taught me good, innovative ways to do math problems, so I actually enjoy it now.”
That’s music to Savely’s ears.
“Relationships are huge,” she said. “The relationships that we build with each other as a group of adults here, the relationships that are built between students and teachers, kind of creating a safe space where children can say, I don’t know, I don’t understand, can I do it a different way?”
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GTECHS itself is the product of doing it a different way. With about 200 early college high schools number throughout the country, GTECHS was the first in Mississippi.
“It’s always been different,” said Brandy Burnett, a teacher who, like Savely, has been at GTECHS from the beginning. “We had a vision we believed in from day one, and we have stayed with it.”
Burnett teaches biology along with anatomy and physiology and a course called “Freshman Focus.”
“A lot of people would call it a study hall,” she said. But it includes “writing in planners — with actual pens — time management, peer tutoring … they have freedom to work on what they need to work on.”
That combination of supposedly disparate things — freedom and academic rigor, a high level of achievement with a relaxed atmosphere — is what stands out at GTECHS. And it explains why students answer the way they do when they are asked if they miss anything about going to school in their home districts.
“For me, no,” Dean said. “You can be yourself, and it’s more hands-on.”
“Not. At. All,” Randle said. “I had to think about it, but it was the best decision I ever made.”
Inevitably, the word “family” comes up.
“A community, like a family,” is how Ivy and several others describe their school.
“I feel like we create such a bond with each other, and I don’t think I was expecting that,” Ivy said. “We look forward to going to school.”
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“A lot of pressure was put on us before we came here to talk about state tests all the time and to get ready for state tests all the time, and that first year was kind of a scary feeling,” Savely said, her smile growing as she continued. “But man, when those scores started rolling in, and we knew we weren’t talking about it a whole lot … We were just teaching kids, and it works.
“It works.”
STORY BY TOM RYSINSKI
PHOTOS BY RORY DOYLE
