[February 10, 2010] EDITORIAL: Cookie cutters tossed aside in some districts: OUR VIEWS New look for education Tweet Feb 10, 2010 (The Oklahoman - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- TWO Oklahoma communities in the news recently provide encouraging examples of what a top-flight public education can look like. In Crescent, a town of about 1,300 in western Logan County, every high school student is equipped with a laptop computer as class work moves more and more toward Web-based content. For a small fee, the students are allowed to take the computers home during the school year. Mobile computer labs are used in the elementary and middle schools at Crescent, where even first-graders are introduced to the Internet. This is the second year the high school has been all digital. "It's fabulous," state Superintendent Sandy Garrett said after a tour of the school last week. Making such a transition happen, she said correctly, "takes great teachers and leaders." Forward-thinking leadership is also on display in Glenpool, which is exploring the possibility of combining its public schools with a branch of Tulsa Community College -- and put it all on one campus. The model would be K through 14 instead of K-12. As a story in the Tulsa World said, this arrangement would give students a chance to put in an extra year and graduate with associate degrees in concentrations that include nursing, biotech and engineering -- all areas begging for more-educated workers in Oklahoma. A shared campus also would save costs through the use of common facilities such as libraries and labs. Glenpool Superintendent Cathy Coley says that if the campus comes to be, then the new attitude at Glenpool "won't be if I attend college, it will be when I attend college. It will become a transition that will be expected and ordinary." How sweet would that be? The president of Tulsa Community College says the early college high school concept is a reality in 24 other states, with positive results. Making it a reality here will cost big money -- $75 million. But school and city officials plan to partner to get it done. Glenpool's mayor says the new-look school system would be an economic development tool for companies that need a better-educated work force. We're rooting for its success, because what we're doing now clearly doesn't work in many cases. If it did, then we wouldn't need remedial courses for 40 percent of the kids who try to get into Oklahoma State and the University of Oklahoma. If it did, we wouldn't have thousands of dropouts every year, particularly at dead-end inner-city schools in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. If what we're doing now worked, we wouldn't have entire school districts with fewer than 100 students. Crescent has thrown away the cookie cutter. Glenpool plans to. Bravo. In Crescent, every high school student is equipped with a laptop computer. To see more of The Oklahoman, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.newsok.com. Copyright (c) 2010, The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]