ANTIGO — At its Monday meeting, the Antigo School Board voted 8-0 to approve a restructured alternative education program for Antigo High School students behind in credits.
A large change in the revised program will be its emphasis on the GED Option 2, often referred to as the GEDO 2, an alternative diploma pathway program for seniors. According to Antigo School District’s Director of Curriculum and Instruction Amy Stutzriem, GEDO 2 will be one of several alternatives for students with credit deficiencies instead of WINGS, which will be replaced by alternative education courses with direct instruction.
Like with WINGS and the online program called Edmentum that WINGS students utilized, the GEDO 2 will require students to complete coursework online. New Antigo High School Principal Trina Borneman, though, described the classroom environment they hope to create with GEDO 2 and the alternative education classes that will be offered to underclassmen as “highly-structured,” and different from WINGS in several additional ways.
“Once students have made it through the GED Option 2 online material, they need to retain that material and use it to pass a GED test that is proctored at a formal testing site,” Borneman said. “This is different from Edmentum where students are completing tasks to obtain a grade in a course. The alt ed program will have a teacher using more direct instruction so that we can assess the students’ learning and adjust instruction to meet their needs. They will have an intervention that supports literacy and builds reading skills to help our students be career and college ready.”
Stutzriem called the restructured alternative education program — including the GEDO 2, which seniors must voluntarily enroll in — more individualized.
“We need someone that’s in front of the class providing interventions, doing those skills, making sure that our kids are ready, talking them through, bringing the counselor in, having those different discussions within that program which will benefit our students in a more positive way,” said Stutzriem, who went on to explain that some at the high school felt that with WINGS and its Edmentum program, some students were flying through online assignments without truly learning, behavior the GEDO 2, with its standardized GED test waiting at the end, would make next to impossible.
“What Trina has in place is that direct instruction from the teacher that our kids need, that social skill, those work skills, that Edmentum can’t help with. Just sitting on a Chromebook clicking and clicking through and then saying, ‘OK, now I’ve got it,’ does not make me better in the world, and we wanted to take that piece out and make sure that we’re really instructing our kids the best that we can,” Stutzriem added.
At an Aug. 12 committee meeting during which the alternative education program was discussed, Board Member Jill Mattek Nelson also commented that she had a similar impression of Edmentum.
“It’s always intrigued me how a student can fail the same class two to three times and then do Edmentum one time and pass the whole year in a week or two weeks,” she said.
At Monday’s meeting, Borneman laid out why a successful alternative education program is needed now more than ever: currently, large swaths of the high school’s student body are deficient in credits.
“In our whole school, we’re looking at 46 percent that are credit deficient in some way — 26 percent of that 46, 129 students, are a grade level behind their peers,” Borneman said. “Those are big numbers.”
Borneman said 23 percent of incoming seniors, 35 percent of juniors, and 21 percent of sophomores at Antigo HIgh School now sit seven or more credits, or an entire grade level, behind where they should be on their paths to graduation.
She said the reasons students are struggling to earn enough credits at the high school likely vary, and could be related to anything from the high school’s shift several years ago from eight to seven class periods (and credits) each year to missed learning during the pandemic.
“If you’re behind in a credit, it means you either failed a class or you weren’t attending school or you possibly transferred in,” Borneman said. “A lot of times when I’ve seen GEDO 2 work is maybe a student was in a different school district or homeschooled for a while and they decided to join a public high school and it was hard for them because it was a different kind of school or they weren’t in the same place in their last district and all of a sudden they’re falling behind and there wasn’t a good safeguard, or they tried and it just starts to really compound, and when you get really far behind, kids give up. It’s hard for them to keep that internal motivation, especially when that credit number is really large and out there.”
Stutzriem said as part of the changed alternative education program, Borneman has instituted an early warning system that identifies 8th and 9th graders who could potentially fall behind on credits in high school, which is part of an effort to prevent the number of students they must try to handle in the high school’s alternative education program from compounding as well.
“I will say it’s also a system problem,” Stutzriem said. “The high school teachers work really hard, but when we consistently send them students who cannot read, and the middle school’s looking like, ‘Yes, but you continuously send me students who can’t decode words,’ we are consistently behind all of those grades. That’s a system problem that we have to address and we are addressing as well. So this isn’t just like, ‘The high school has to fix everything and then it’s going to be great.’ It is a system problem because it’s really hard as 8th and 9th graders if I read as a 3rd grader for any teacher to stand in front of that class and be able to teach the content at the level that 8th and 9th graders should be up to. So I wanted to put that out there, because this is not a high school problem, this is a system problem, this is an Antigo problem, and we are going to flip that and move that in a new direction.”
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