Students Embrace North Cobb High’s Freshman Academy

Nothing has been left to chance with the opening of

The new $19 million addition to the north side of North Cobb’s 54-year-old campus was the culmination of a four-year process that involved researching other ninth-grade facilities and its staff attending national conferences.

“We looked at the best programs in the country as well as metro- Atlanta to see what works and, at the same time, what not to do,” said Michelle Luckett, Freshman Academy coordinator. “Our goal is to be, in one year, where other programs were at the end of their third year -- and so far, so good in meeting that mark.”

TACKLING A NATIONAL PROBLEM

Lowering the national and state average of about 40 percent of ninth graders unable to advance to the tenth grade has been the impetus for the growth of school systems building separate ninth-grade campuses throughout the country.

“In the ninth-grade Academy, we’re able to provide safety nets for our ninth graders that we weren’t able to in the past,” said North Cobb Principal Phillip Page, who is in his third year at North Cobb and 22^nd year as an educator. “We’ve developed teams of teachers for each child. We’ve got about 120 students on the same team with about two to four teachers.”

To better reach the approximately 800 students housed at the Freshman Academy, each of the Academy’s teachers meet weekly with each other to share information about students they have in common.

“All the subject teachers have the same common planning and are off the same time each week,” Page said. “Essentially, every student is taught by every teacher through their ideas in the lesson plans.”

Page said he has already seen and heard the difference the Academy has had for this year’s freshman class. “They look more confident and, hopefully, we’ve taken out a lot of the harassment out of their school day that often occurs between upperclassmen and incoming freshmen,” he said. “One of our junior students commented on ‘Tomahawk Today’ that he wished he had the opportunity to be a part of the Freshman Academy.”

ATTITUDES CHANGING QUICKLY

Freshman math teacher Michael Eber said he has already seen a change in attitude from this year’s ninth graders. Eber, like the other 26 Freshman Academy teachers at North Cobb, requested to teach in the new building, which Luckett said illustrated the “passion” each of the educators has for the grade level.

“To me, the students are more focused on learning and the behavior in all situations – classroom, hallways, lunchroom – is significantly better than previous years,” said Eber, who has taught two years at North Cobb. “When I have talked to them, they’ve told me they feel so privileged because of the facilities and how beautiful everything is and up-to-date.”

ACADEMY FEATURES VIDEO MICROSCOPE

The 72,000-square-foot Freshman Academy includes a separate 300-seat cafeteria that research indicated was crucial to a successful program. The two-story building features 40 instructional units, which are broken into core subject areas such as English, math, science and social studies.

Each classroom features a Promethium board, an LCD projector and the wireless iRespond system, which students use to answer questions in real-time from the teacher. The Academy’s science lab includes a video microscope. Science teacher Alan Gorlin said the expensive microscope can save a slide’s image digitally and also hook up to a computer in order to project the image. Gorlin said the microscope can magnify specimens up to 1,000 times.

Freshmen are purposely separated from North Cobb’s other 1,800 students and they only mingle with upperclassmen when they take elective classes or if they participate in afterschool extracurricular activities. In fact, outside of upperclassmen academic mentors, only freshmen are allowed on the Freshman Academy’s second floor.

“The ninth-grade year is a transition from middle school into high school, academically and socially,” Luckett said. “In eighth grade, you’re in the average grade-level size of 300 (students) and then you come to a high school with a student population of over 2,000 and you get lost. The Freshman Academy’s purpose is to ease that transition. What the research shows across the country is that, if you can contain them in their core classes – English, math, science and social studies – there’s a greater chance of academic success.”

Freshman Administrator Greg Barilow added: “This is a key time and, if they’re successful in their freshman year, it just filters out the rest of their career.”

North Cobb’s Freshman Academy joins South Cobb High’s $23.2 million Freshman Transition Academy, which also opened this year, as Cobb County School District’s only special purpose local option sales tax (SPLOST) funded separate ninth-grade centers. will receive the next freshman academy and an award for its construction is slated for January, SPLOST Chief Administrative Officer Doug Shepard said.

It’s unclear, at this time of economic uncertainty, if the district's other 13 high schools will be receiving ninth-grade academies in the future.