7 March 2012 Spring Break!

Spring Break!
The phrase conjures up visions of lazy, crazy days on the beach. Not so for a few faculty, staff, and 26 adventurous students of Macon Early College High School. I just got back from a tour of several colleges and universities in the middle area of North Carolina. Our students are lucky to be part of an innovative program called the Early College Initiative. Our campus is located on the campus of Southwestern Community College, and students attend our school for five years, taking college classes beginning their freshman year. Upon graduation, they have earned their high school diploma and college credits transferable to four year colleges and universities. Ideally, in five years, they earn their diploma and an AA transfer degree, at no cost to them. Most of our students can transfer in to a four year program as juniors, saving them a fabulous amount of money! We emphasize college readiness in all our high school class work, so a spring break trip to see colleges and universities in North Carolina is a great opportunity for them to get the feel of campuses they might be interested in attending. For this tour, we headed to Greensboro, NC, about three hours East of Franklin. Our first stop was Wake Forest University, a grand private school especially famous for degrees in Medicine, and oh yes, they have a basketball team.

That evening we shopped and ate at a mall, particularly fun because it's something our little town of Franklin doesn't have. The second day of our trip we toured the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and also Greensboro College. We enjoyed wonderful tours given by student ambassadors, observed their ability to walk backwards while speaking to us, and listened to their personal stories of college experiences. Finally, on Wednesday, we had tours of High Point University and Gardner-Webb University. The students were extremely impressed with the newness of High Point University, and the general atmosphere of enthusiasm and excitement pervading that campus.

A few of the amazing things we saw on the High Point campus were: dorm suites that rivaled most of our houses, a steak house on campus expressly designed for students to learn how to eat out and establish business relationships, and board rooms that seemed larger than Donald Trump's on The Apprentice. Students are back now, motivated to work harder to keep up their GPAs', and visualizing great futures in their lives after Macon Early College.