It’s your first year of high school and you’re so excited to finally be a freshman. The high school experience is waiting for you! Football games, school dances, plays and musicals, and finals all await you. All the key aspects of being a high schooler. 

   Oh, and one more thing: school academies that unnecessarily force you to give up some of your schedule.

   The College and Career Academies of Rockford is a program in the RPS205 district that is focused on preparing students for life after graduation. The program, which rolled out around 2013, installed academies into the school courses, simulating college majors. After Freshman year, a student is placed into an academy and pathway of their choosing and takes required courses related to those academies. There are four academies: Business, Production, Service, and Health, with each of them having 2-4 pathways. The system is supposed to help students plan for their future, but the many flaws in its execution really make me hate the program.

   Freshman year, you don’t have to join a pathway yet, but you are required to take a College and Career Readiness class as part of the “Freshman Academy.” College and Career Readiness, or CCR, is a year-long course that’s supposed to help prepare freshmen for their future. It’s a great idea that could be really helpful if it is taught correctly. Unfortunately, the “College and Career Readiness” class does not prepare students for college or a career. What it actually teaches is how to choose a school academy and pathway. Most kids don’t know what they want to do in life, but instead of learning what they can major in or do as a career, they focus on choosing academies. The entire first semester of the class is just dedicated to learning about the different academies and eventually leads to choosing them at the end of the semester. Freshmen are required to choose what they want to do for the rest of high school during their first semester. The second semester should be about teaching how to choose college majors or find careers, right? Well, not exactly. The second semester touches on the subject of jobs and skips over college completely.  So much for being college-ready in a College and Career class. This makes the Freshmen “Academy” really only useful in title and as a placeholder, as the required course within the academy doesn’t provide a real educational benefit, and instead just prepares students for the feeling of losing the opportunity to take an extra elective, which comes with taking a pathway class.

    With the pathway being a required class, it takes up a space where an elective would be. So the student has fewer opportunities to enjoy high school, with less choices for elective classes. There are so many classes that students don’t have the opportunity to enjoy because their schedule has fewer slots. Fine arts classes such as art, band, theater, and orchestra don’t look as good on college applications as electives such as AP Psychology. So when given the choice, the fine arts get the boot. The program has been on a steady decline, but with fewer elective options due to required pathway classes, the nail in the arts’ coffin is set. 

  There are thousands of college majors and even more options when it comes to choosing a career. So the pathways, which are supposed to parallel and prepare for said choices, should have… 12 options? There are 12 different pathways to choose from, with a lot of them being similar career paths, meaning the few academy and pathway choices only really help the students who plan to go into those specific career paths. A majority of students who are in pathway classes don’t intend on entering that subject as a career. What’s the point of having a class that’s supposed to help you “prepare for the future” if that’s not what you plan to do in the future? There are so few options that it really doesn’t help the majority of students, and having it as a required class only takes away a part of the student’s schedule. 

   While some problems occur with the program being required, it is a great tool for those who plan to pursue careers within the confines of what’s provided. The senior pathway classes offer partnerships with the community that offers real-world career experiences, such as the pre-med path, that offers real nursing classes at Rock Valley College. It allows students to get a jumpstart on their future if the program is utilized to the student’s specific needs and goals. While the program has some positives, it’s not enough to change my opinion: I still hate the academies.