Bearcat Bandwagon aimed at promoting academics

The Bearcat Bandwagon will begin rolling this fall and school leaders hope more and more students will want to jump on.

The bandwagon -- an effort to promote academics and extracurricular activities to some of the city’s poorest families -- is just one new idea to emerge from a recent lengthy School Board retreat.

 Board members also voiced support for developing a program to marry academic achievement with public service and extracurricular activities to create more well-rounded students.

After checking off many of the goals the board established for itself and the school division during the past year, board members spent hours discussing ways to improve attendance, graduation rates and student involvement. The first step, they agreed, is a concerted community outreach.

During the five Friday afternoons when Virginia High School’s football team has a home game, board members, administrators and teachers would visit public housing areas, taking food and game tickets to students who couldn’t otherwise afford to go.

“If you have food, everybody will come out and listen,” board member Tyrone Foster said. “Food is the common language.”

Sports would be the magnet, board member Randy Alvis said.

“We would use sports to get their attention, but talk about academics and encourage them to take harder classes,” Alvis said. “And just let them know we want to come back around at report card time and see how they’re doing.”

Superintendent Mark Lineburg praised board members for their initiative.

“Seventy percent of the kids in our elementary schools are on free and reduced price lunches,” Lineburg said, meaning that their family’s incomes are low enough to qualify for federal assistance. “There are so many kids who we’re trying to reach, to encourage them to take more rigorous classes. I think this is a great idea.”

Once the pre-game picnics end, board members also discussed the possibility of using a school bus to transport students to games and to explore reducing student admission fees.

“If they can’t afford lunch, they can’t afford $5 to get into a game,” board Chairman Ronald Cameron said. “This might be the only game they get to all year and we also want to try and build school spirit back to where it used to be.”

The focus on academics is all part of increasing the division’s graduation rate, which was about 81 percent during the 2009-10 academic year, Assistant Superintendent Rex Gearheart said.

“We won’t know for this past year until September,” Gearheart said, because the state-produced four-year calculation includes every student that entered as a freshman – whether they remained to graduate, dropped out or transferred to another school system.

Of the 151 Virginia High seniors enrolled during the 2010-11 school year, 144 received some type of diploma during commencement ceremonies, Lineburg said.

Virginia’s average graduation rate is also about 81 percent, but federal standards under the No Child Left Behind Act are expected to continue pushing that number higher.

The board also agreed to initiate a year-long study to create programming to reward students for taking more challenging advanced placement courses, being involved in extracurricular activities and community service.

“I’d like to see us create our own program – something unique and rigorous,” board member Beth Rhinehart said. “Something to help make our kids more competitive, whether they’re entering the job market or college.”

The program, Rhinehart said, could replace the ill-fated International Baccalaureate program, which school leaders dropped, citing high operating costs and limited enrollment.

“A lot of people had the wrong idea about IB,” board Vice Chairman Randy White said. “They thought it was strictly an academic thing, but it was much more than that.”

White urged – and other board members agreed – that school officials take the next year to study ways to bring those elements together, develop a program and plan to implement it for the 2012-13 academic year.

dmcgee@bristolnews.com
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