Listen very long to any area school board meeting, and most likely talk of Tech Valley High School will come up, assuming the district is still sending students.
Recently, some Guilderland Board of Education members have voiced concern over continuing to send students to Tech Valley High School. During a tight budget, spending additional money on a single student while reductions affect many children can be hard to justify. Tuition to TVHS is about $13,000 per school year, but state aid covers around 55 percent of the cost.
TVHS Principal Dan Liebert on Tuesday, March 18, gave a presentation to the school board after some members had requested more information on the regional school.
Liebert said the school aims to teach to a different set of learning outcomes, which is what industry and academic leaders said should drive the school.
“It is not that Tech Valley High School is better or superior,” Liebert said. “It is attempting to learn how to teach to those set of skills that both higher education and business are encouraging us to teach.”
In September, the school is moving to the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, which is actually within the Guilderland school district. Liebert said the school has the capacity to hold 40 students in each grade level, but it currently has about 30 students per grade.
“Fingers are crossed that we may be hitting our first full enrollment class for our incoming ninth- graders,” Liebert said.
The program takes a student-centered learning approach and students make around 150-160 presentations annually to their class. Liebert said this allows students to build confidence speaking in front of a group and learning how to best convey their ideas to others. Students are also responsible for giving feedback to each other, too, along with teachers.
“We need to teach deliberately to not just content … but we also measure students on their performance, collaboration, communication … and they get graded on how well their work displays critical thinking,” Liebert said.
TVHS representatives admitted at the board meeting that the collaboration it had promised to offer schools had not been delivered, but it was working to correct the problem. Part of the problem was simply focusing on making sure the school was up and running properly, according to TVHS leaders.
Four teachers from Guilderland shadowed teachers at TVHS on Monday, March 17, as part of the collaboration with the regional public high school. Teachers learned about project- based learning (PBL) and how TVHS students learn solely through this method.
“We are implementing PBL and we are here to learn how it is done at Tech Valley,” said Lara Lilly, a science teacher at Guilderland, in a statement. “It’s very interesting, especially here [in biotechnology class] where the students are learning about evolution.”
Guilderland teachers first visited the school in February. Later this year, Stacia Snow, a TVHS teachers and professional development coach, will visit Guilderland to pick up some techniques from the district’s teachers.
“This is an excellent example of schools working together to improve and better the education delivered to students,” Liebert said.
TVHS senior Sara Sisson, who Guilderland sent to the school, said she was grateful for her experience
“My experience at Tech Valley has been great,” Sisson said. “They really helped me come out of my shell because before I went there I was really, really shy, and I wouldn’t talk to anyone.”
Sisson is planning on going into physical therapy, which is something she can’t imagine herself doing without having gone to TVHS. She said the idea of working with strangers was a “scary” thought to her before, but now she welcomes the challenge of meeting new people.
“You have to be open to new things to be challenged and that is really what Tech Valley is about,” she said. “Challenging you to go beyond your comfort zone and really going outside your box.”