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City Beat
WGMS and WGHS focus on robotics and math
Schools hope to steer more young students to college
By Moryt Milo
Looking to distinguish themselves within the San Jose Unified School District, Willow Glen Middle School and Willow Glen High School have chosen to integrate robotics and AVID, a specialized math program, into their school curriculum. The programs are all part of the schools' long-range plans to encourage and motivate every student to go on to college after graduating from high school.
This fall, the middle school implemented a math program called AVID-- Advancement Via Individual Determination. The students in the AVID program were selected based on their math potential, as determined by their achievement test scores on the SAT9 standardized test. Only 30 of the 400 seventh- and eighth-graders were chosen.
Middle school principal Lois Allen said the idea behind the program is to motivate children at an early age to recognize their potential and desire to go on to college.
"Many of these students, who have the potential in math, don't have the vision of going to college because of their life circumstances," Allen said. "We tell them how bright they are and put them into advanced math classes."
The goal of the AVID program is for students to pass Math I before they graduate from middle school and prepare them to take 10th-grade math when they enter high school in the ninth grade.
Allen's goal is to have one seventh and one eighth-grade class per year enrolled in the AVID program.
Allen said that because AVID is expensive--it costs $25,000 per year--she had to budget carefully to implement the program this year.
"Next year I will probably have to dig deeper, and we may have to look for outside funding," Allen said, referring to the recent economic downturn that is affecting school funding.
But Willow Glen High School Principal Pat Day still plans to add the AVID program to the school's fall 2002 high school curriculum.
The schools' decision to go forward with the AVID program was based on a number of variables. The schools are located next to each other and can work closely together from seventh grade to high school to create a continuous curriculum of advanced math. They also found that research showed "that it's math which usually keeps kids out of four-year colleges or gets them in," Day said.
Finances also helped determine which specialty programs would best fit at Willow Glen Middle and High School.
"Candidly, there are schools that have good fine-arts program and are well-supported financially, but for us to try without financial backing to implement a fine-arts program--it would be very hard," Allen said.
Day also said that when they were initially selecting a specialty for the schools, a fine arts program was discussed, but " the conversation quickly turned toward robotics, which fit better with the math focus."
The high school robotics program, which is in its second year, will now be integrated into the middle-school curriculum.
The middle school students, who will work on the Lego robotics competition, see the high school students preparing to compete in the NASA robotics competition, and the younger students become very motivated, Day said.
"The high school students act as mentors for middle school students, and everyone is excited," Day said.
The schools' long-range goal is to develop a robotics program that begins in sixth grade and continues through 12th grade.
The robotics program has also generated benefits at the high school level that have reached beyond the classroom.
When the high school seniors designing the homecoming float wanted to embellish it with running water, they asked the robotics students to help them.
"The robotics students don't usually get involved with a lot of after-school activities," Day said. "Now the high-profile seniors were working with the robotics seniors, and it brought the two groups closer together. It demonstrated that being smart was OK, which is exactly the attitude and mindset we are trying to create with these programs."
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
