“Choices Program” provides education and career direction to off-track students
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February 8, 2010 • Meg Mielke, Editor
Filed under 2010-2011
One piece of information that the students of Chugiak High School might be surprised to hear is that we have representatives from the National Guard visiting the school every Monday, and they stay the whole day. While the National Guard members are designated recruiters, their focus at Chugiak is community outreach.
These representatives conduct workshops with students who are enrolled in the “Academic Enrichment” course, a class consisting of freshmen who have failed two or more core classes. Thirty-six students are enrolled in this course, and each of them has a designated hour during the day where they attend the class. The goal of this class, of course, is to get these students back on track. The program offered by the National Guard is called “Choices” and it’s a workshop with a focus on life planning, as well as looking at patterns of behavior with negative consequences and trying to find a way to reform those behaviors.
During one of these workshops, the plan for the day was looking at employment opportunities and calculating how much a person needs to live. The end result was the realization from every student in the class that it would be very difficult to get by on a minimum wage job, a struggle they will have to go through if they do not graduate high school; hence, making better choices.
To have a program like this, there must be a request made to the National Guard. While other schools throughout the Anchorage School District participate in the “Choices Program”, some are not as extensive as Chugiak’s.
Shannon Tallent, from the Army National Guard, works exclusively with the academic enrichment course at Chugiak High School. During the course of an observed class period, Tallent used a number of different mechanisms in trying to get students to think more seriously about their academic careers. He talked at length about family expectations, leaving the class with the question of, “What would your parents do if you came home with straight As on your report card?”
Tallent also weaved personal experience into his story, claiming that he himself was not a top-notch student, but when he began to think seriously about school, the emotional reward was the best prize out there.
Commenting on the most effective way to get students back on the right path, Tallent stated, “Have them take a realistic look at the future. When they realize that it’s not as easy as they thought, they begin to think beyond just living in high school.”
