October 28, 2009
Bowling
Green, Ky. - When Gov. Steve Beshear signed Senate Bill 1 into law in March, it set into motion events 
that would impact Kentucky high school students who would seek postsecondary education.
A significant part of the legislation requires the development of plans to reduce the number of high school graduates who need remedial classes at the college level by making sure they are ready for college when they graduate.
Western Kentucky University is working with the Green River Regional Education Cooperative and its member school districts to take a leadership role “to make sure the students in this region are as ready as they can be for a college education,” said Sharon Hunter, WKU’s coordinator of college readiness.
Photo Caption: Kentucky Rep. Jody Richards, D-Bowling Green, talks about Senate Bill 1 on the WKU campus Wednesday.
“We know what a college education costs and we know the value of a college education,” she said. “Senate Bill 1 impacts students deciding to go to college now and we want to let students and parents in our region know what the expectations are and work with the school districts to help them get ready for college.”
Rep. Jody Richards, D-Bowling Green, said the goals of the legislation “are to better prepare the student for success in all levels of education and to assure readiness for postsecondary education.”
New standards under SB1, based on ACT scores, raise the threshold of remediation requirements. Students will be required to take remedial classes at any Kentucky college or university if the score below 19 in math, 20 in reading or 18 in English on the ACT. Underprepared students may be required to take up to four remedial courses at the beginning of their higher education careers, costing them more in tuition and in time to graduation.
“They could be spending a full semester in time and tuition just to get ready for college, but we want them to get ready for free in high school,” Hunter said.
WKU, partnering with GRREC and its member school districts, has developed four initiatives to support the SB1 provisions.
- Preparing 4 the Final 4: Getting Your Head in the Game. Using a $30,000 grant from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education and internal funding, WKU offered 23 juniors from Bowling Green and Warren County six hours of college credit by pairing an introductory college-level class with a Literacy 199 class. The goal was to use actual college material to teach the students how to read, analyze and comprehend college-level text. The program also included four days of professional development for 24 high school teachers and 33 WKU faculty including the faculty teaching the college level courses.
- Literacy in the Disciplines Paired Partners. This program enhances communication between high school teachers and college faculty to improve alignment of expectations and to increase the likelihood of each student’s successful transition from high school to postsecondary education.
- College Readiness Math Pilot. WKU administered a math placement exam to 2,480 high school juniors in 17 high schools in one of the largest pilot project of its kind in Kentucky. In the spring, WKU plans to test all 8,100 juniors in the GRREC so that the students will know where they stand before their senior year. This will allow schools and students time in their senior year to overcome deficiencies and will incorporate the alignment of high school and postsecondary SB1 requires by December 2009. In addition, WKU will use its research expertise to provide school districts with regionally-based intervention to help prepare the students for college.
- Summer Early Entry Program. This bridge program, which began before SB1, allows students to take remedial courses in the summer before their first fall semester. Students can then begin the fall better prepared for college-level work.
WKU Provost Barbara Burch said WKU’s literacy strategies have become a model both regionally and statewide. She added that WKU has had an assessment and placement policy in place since 2000 for students with ACT scores below 18 in English, reading and math. The aim of SB1 is to reduce the number of students needing that help by 50 percent by 2014. “This is just the beginning of our efforts,” she said.
“The students who will make up the class of 2014 are today’s eighth graders,” Dr. Burch said. “However, we cannot ignore the students who will enter college before then so we are working with GRREC and our school districts in the interim with professional development, college readiness assessments and data to help schools with interventions.”
Dr. Burch added, “We were quick to recognize that this is something that requires a partnership and we are so fortunate in this part of the state to have GRREC in this partnership.” She said the partnership with GRREC, the area school districts and the Kentucky Community and Technical College System through Bowling Green Technical College, “will do everything possible to make sure the students who come to postsecondary education in this region are going to be ready, whatever it takes.”
For the provisions of SB1 to be successful, higher education and the school systems will have to become partners. Some systems, such as Simpson County, “were forward looking and partnered with us before they had to so they could better prepare and inform their students,” Hunter said.
Simpson County Superintendent James Flynn said they were trying to accomplish a simple goal: “To make every student who graduates from Franklin-Simpson High School be college and work ready.” Too many students across the country are graduating from high school without the skills necessary to be successful in college, he said.
Flynn said Franklin-Simpson partnered with WKU to test all seniors in math and let them know where they stand and what they can do to prepare during their senior year. He said the system has also partnered with Bowling Green Technical College to help students get an early start in college while in high school. BGTC is charging only for the first credit hour for college courses taken during high school while the school district is paying for developmental courses, he said.
Chelsea Thomason, a WKU freshman and 2009 Logan County High School graduate, said college and high school are “two different worlds.” Thomason came to WKU with 12 credit hours through dual credit programs and graduated with honors from high school.
“I’m still struggling in college,” she said. “I thought I was prepared and I get here and I’m not. I’m taking the steps I need to be more prepared in the following years. I have a goal that even though I’m not prepared, I will graduate from Western.”
Thomason is in Dr. Pam Petty’s Literacy 199 course. “It’s probably one of the best classes I have,” she said. “It helps me with the rest of my courses. It teaches you strategies on how to learn. It teaches you who you are as a learner and what strategies work for you and what strategies don’t.”
School districts currently partnering with WKU on the college readiness math pilot include: Allen County, Bowling Green Independent, Campbellsville Independent, Caverna Independent, Clinton County, Cloverport Independent, Edmonson County, Grayson County, Green County, Hancock County, Hart County, LaRue County, Logan County, Meade County, Metcalfe County, Simpson County and Warren County.
Liz Storey, GRREC executive director, said the high schools in the region “have goals of increasing rigor in the academic courses, of increasing thinking strategies so that our kids can confront the challenges of the 21st Century and the work world they are going to enter in a short time.”
Superintendent Joe Tinius of the Bowling Green Independent Schools said school districts should be looking at what their students are doing five years after graduating from high school, not just the next fall. “The programs we’re involved in now help move us in that direction,” he said. “If they are college ready, there’s a much better chance they will be successful.”
There is also an obligation for the school systems to let students and their parents know where they stand in regards to college readiness, Tinius said. “Those developmental courses cost the same as a degree credit, but they don’t get credit for them, and we need to be up front with parents and let them know that,” he said.
Tinius also said his district is participating in a program where high school teachers are paired with college professors in the same subjects and spend time in each other’s classrooms. “I think this is going to open the door to remove some real misconceptions on both ends as to what we are doing to try to prepare students and what is the expectation when they arrive at college,” he said.
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