Rationale
William Penn High School is a public high school in the Colonial School District in New Castle County, DE. It is the only high school in the district and is the largest high school in the entire state, serving between 2,000 and 2,200 each year across grades 9-12. The district is considered suburban/urban fringe and serves a diverse population in terms of both race and income. Several years ago, William Penn began focusing on the growth of Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs that provide opportunities for students to experience a vocational-type education while still being provided with the traditional college preparatory education typical of public schools. Such a shift has allowed the school to retain students who may otherwise attend one of the four area Vo-Tech schools. Students entering William Penn chose a degree program to specialize in within one of three college academies: Business, Humanities, or STEM. Degree programs within the Business College Academy include Air Force JRTOC, Business Administration, Culinary Arts, Financial Services, and Accounting. Degree programs with the Humanities College Academy include Behavioral Sciences, Communications, Teacher Academy, Legal Studies, International Studies, and Visual and Performing Arts. The STEM College Academy offers degree programs in Agriculture, Allied Health, Computer Science, Construction, Engineering, Manufacturing, Mathematics, and Science. William Penn also offers 25 Advanced Placement courses, the largest number of any school in the state. This dual focus on college and career readiness has greatly improved the school culture and the school’s image in the community, which has translated to the growth in the student population.
This growth in student population and interest in the sciences helped me justify the need for adding AP Environmental Science to the course catalog in the 2016/17 school year. Students enrolled in the Agriculture degree program can specialize in the Environmental Science pathway, which requires them to take two years of on-level environmental science before enrolling in APES as their capstone course. Since the course is officially part of a CTE program, students are expected to finish the course with some sort of job-applicable skill. To me, getting students to think critically about environmental problems and potential solution is my primary goal, but am always looking for ways to address those job skills as well. Learning how to study an environmental problem and propose and implement an engineering solution is certainly a job skill that would serve students well as they move into the workforce. Such skills include working with topographical maps and hydraulic runoff models to study how different surfaces and geographies impact runoff and flooding.
This seminar also provides me with the opportunity to address two major shortfalls of my course. The first issue is that my course has always lacked a deep and meaningful connection to the solutions to environmental problems. We talk ad nauseam about the myriad environmental problems we face, but spend little time discussing the solutions to those problems. To address this problem, College Board has made a concerted effort in their redesign of the course to include more solution-oriented content into the course. Last year I tried incorporating more anecdotal stories about environmental successes, like the Montreal Protocol and the impacts of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. And while this was a good first step, I find the course still lacks meaningful content that incorporates the science and engineering of those solutions.
The second issue is that my course lacks true connection to the local environment. Many of the environmental issues we discuss in class, such as deforestation, increasingly frequent droughts and wildfires, contamination of drinking water sources, and even climate change to some degree lack an immediate and tangible connection to the community around us. But because urban flooding is so frequent in certain portions of our community, the issues related to stormwater management and land use are front and center. Focusing on this issue and developing a high quality curriculum unit that pulls back the curtain on how stormwater management techniques functions is a solid first step in addressing these shortfalls and improving my course for all students.
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