Teachers and staff from the Rochester City School District’s Jefferson High School are participating in UR classes as a precursor to a revolution in high school curriculum.
“We have been talking about this for over a year,” Dean of The College William Green said. “They will be using concepts of entrepreneurship to create a conceptual grid that undergirds all that they teach.
Over the summer, a select group of teachers from the high school will form a new curriculum based on the concepts of entrepreneurship. It will be first taught to 75 incoming seventh graders at the school.
To offer a more focused curriculum in a high school is not a new idea, however Jefferson’s administration is making an unprecedented step toward better education in the city’s schools. “When you look into these students’ eyes, what is missing is hope,” Jefferson High School Principal Mary Andrecolich-Diaz said. “We need to build that back, and we have a lot of support to do so.”
Andrecolich-Diaz plans to create a school in which the concepts of entrepreneurship are integrated into every facet of the curriculum. For the first year of the plan, half of the seventh graders will be integrated into the program. The next year, all incoming students will receive the new curriculum, and as they advance through their school years they will bring it with them. Eventually, every student at Jefferson will receive entrepreneurship-based education.
“We are trying to make a more personalized learning environment,” Andrecolich-Diaz said. “Jefferson will be a ‘small-school’ community that promotes better student-teacher relationships.”
Integral to the new curriculum will be interaction with faculty and students at UR.
In addition to training teachers at UR, Jefferson will send students to campus and will bring UR staff and students to the high school to speak. “This is a school of economically underprivileged kids who have enormous potential,” Green said. “UR will help to foster that potential.”
Jefferson’s new plan for education was born over a year ago. Green’s involvement in the Kauffman Foundation’s entrepreneurship initiative led to a proposed partnership between Jefferson and UR. “We wrote a proposal for the partnership, and presented it to UR,” Rochester City School District Director of Secondary English and Language Arts Connie Leech said. “We came to UR, talked to Dean Green, and began to write up our curriculum plan.”
Jefferson High School is located in the northwest corner of the city, in an economically underprivileged area symptomatic of the current educational problems in city high schools. “We think that this will help the community as much as it helps the students,” Andrecolich-Diaz said. “They don’t know the first thing about college, and if we plant the seed of it in their mind, it’s an entirely new world open to them.”
The school’s faculty intends to bring parents into the high school equation in addition to students. “We are going to have a kickoff event this summer,” Andrecolich-Diaz said. “Our aim is to create a lot of connections between the parents and guardians and the school.”
Andrecolich-Diaz and her staff believe that an inner-city school is the ideal ground for this new form of education. “Students here believe that if you fail, everything is over,” Andrecolich-Diaz said. “We will show them that to succeed, they need not to gamble their lives away but to learn from their mistakes and take calculated and well-thought out risks.”
Green expressed this same sentiment in his Nature of Entrepreneurship class. “Part of what we want to teach is that every bit of knowledge is the result of some failure,” Green said. “A risk is a rational, thought-out venture. A gamble is not.”
In a situation in which it is easy to succumb to the pressures of drugs, gangs and other social ills, Jefferson High School’s staff believes that an introduction to a better life is crucial to push students toward productivity in their lives. “Seventh grade is the ideal time to give students a taste of their potential,” Andrecolich-Diaz said. “They are old enough to plan for the future, but young enough not to be swallowed by the city.”
Perhaps the most important lesson taught by the entrepreneurship program will be confidence in one’s self. “I need people who are here to instill hope,” Andrecolich-Diaz said. “Part of life is failing – you need to learn to get yourself back up.”Majarian can be reached at mmajarian@campustimes.org
