Spring and Renewal are in the Air

The official beginning of Spring is four days away and with Spring and warmer weather comes budding flowers and new growth. Truman High School is also in the process of changing and growing.

Truman High School will be making changes next year in order to better serve the students who attend our school. Our number one goal is to ensure that each scholar who walks through our doors is prepared to accomplish their goals and dreams. In order to increase our success with this goal, two significant things will be happening.

First, the Truman Campus will house three programs of Choice that serve a variety of scholars who need a learning model that is different than offered at our comprehensive high schools. Career Academy will be housed in the West Wing of the building, and Open Doors and Internet Academy will be housed in the East Wing. The three programs, although seperate and distinct, will work collaboratively to serve the scholars of our community.

The second shift comes with changes in how students will graduate from Career Academy. On March 14th, the Federal Way School Board approved a waiver proposal which will be presented to the State Board of Education in May. This waiver, if approved, will shift the requirements for graduation  at Truman and Open Doors. With the waiver, graduation would be based on a set of Coginitive and Habits of Success competencies rather than credits and courses.   Each set of competencies comes with a developmental rubric that encompasses skill development 9th-12th grade. These competencies are aligned to the college readiness standards being used by our traditional schools and will ensure that our students are ready for career and college.

Each student at Career Academy will have an assigned mentor that will help them through their entire high school career at Truman. The mentor and scholar will develop a Personal Learning Plan that will guide what learning they will do in order to have evidence for their exhibition of learning where the students will show to parents, community and teachers what they have learned every 12 week cycle.

Career Academy and Open Doors scholars will engage in a variety of learning experience in and out of the school setting to gather the skills they need to show that they are meeting the competencies required for graduation. Scholars will participate in 12 week learning cycles that begin with 11 weeks of learning through project-based content seminars, expeditions, college classes, internships, student designed projects, volunteer work, and work-based learning experiences.  At the end of each learning cycle scholars will present their learning to a panel of adults and students. This panel will determine where the student is in their progress to meeting the established competencies and provide feedback about next steps. The scholar will then work with their mentor to revise their personal learning plans for the next learning cycle.

As the skills need to be successful in the 21st century are continually shifting and many of the jobs our scholars will have do not even exist today, ee are very excited about how this shift will allow our scholars to show what they know and can do through a variety of learning experiences both in the context of school, work and the community.

We will be hosting two informational session to answer questions about our program. The first will be March 30th at 6:00pm and the second will be April 20th at 5:00pm.

Dr. Corbley

Principal