The Early College program at Mount Everett Regional School is already transforming lives both in and out of the classroom.
“I was having a meeting with a father who was asking, this would be the first time anybody in his family was going to college, and he was nervous, could his kid succeed there? And he asked me point blank, do you think my kid has what it takes, because I don't want to waste their time, we don't have the money for this if it's just going to be a year and done. What do you think?" said Teacher Kevin Wolgemuth. “And I told him, your kid is ready, they have the skill sets, they have the curiosity, and they want to see what they can do, and the father said, okay, and was willing to give the child a chance to get out there and try something.”
The Southern Berkshire Regional School District in the bucolic and agrarian southwestern corner of Massachusetts serves around 600 young people from the surrounding community. Mount Everett provides a 6-12th-grade education to almost half of those students at its Sheffield campus.
“We've got students who travel through the woods or cross pastures to get to school every day, and they don't have access to a lot of the resources that urban young people have," said Early College Program Coordinator Lindy Marcel. "And so, this partnership, this initiative is really about exposure and exploration of new topics, new ideas, new projects to work on, that rural students wouldn't otherwise come in contact with.”
Seven years ago, the Early College program began as a collaboration with Simon’s Rock, the pioneering private early college institution in neighboring Great Barrington operated by Bard College. That partnership changed last year when Simon’s Rock closed its doors and relocated to Bard’s main campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
“At first it was a little bit nerve-wracking, as far as, like, where do we go next?" said Mount Everett Principal Jesse Carpenter. "They were really great- Simon's Rock offered to stay with us, worked with us with the state to ensure that this year our kids would get credit, which I think was really, really helpful. Because what scared our community the most was, oh man, do kids not get credits this year?”
UMass Amherst’s venture with Mount Everett marks the first ever Early College program for the commonwealth’s flagship public university with a student body over 50 times larger than the entire Southern Berkshire Regional School District. Once it’s fully implemented next year, the expanded program will bolster Mount Everett’s Early College courses with new classes in STEM fields, and give the comparatively miniscule rural public high school rare bragging rights.
“Despite the fact that we're small, we still can provide some of the things that a bigger high school might have, and in this case, we can provide something that maybe only some high schools that were really in large urban areas, where you'd have a kid walk across the street to a college in Worcester or a college in Boston," said Carpenter. "To be able to do this from the distance we are from [UMass Amherst], I think makes it really unique.”
Students at Mount Everett participating in the Early College program say it’s working for them.
“We come from a military family. We have people that have served for years," Junior Jonathan Fredsall told WAMC. "My great-grandfather, who is a big influence on my younger years, he served in Vietnam, so that was a kind of a driving factor when I was little. I've known I wanted to go into the military since I was four.”
Fredsall is planning on joining after he graduates, and hopes the credits he’s accruing through the program now will aid his journey through the ranks.
“My initial plan is to enlist and then do my first contract, and then do the program through Green to Gold Commission, become an officer later," he explained. "But first to do that, you need to have an associate's degree and a college GPA, so I need to get college credits and classes, so I'm hoping to do my CLEP exams, DSST exams. I'll get a couple credits from basic training and credits from here.”
Junior Quinn Butler-Carlson is graduating a year early thanks to the Early College courses, which offered a stark contrast to traditional high school classes.
“It's not so structured where you have to do these strict certain assignments and everything- You can kind of manipulate what you're doing," he told WAMC. "It's the same certain classes or assignments, but you have freedom to what your product will be. And I think that's really cool for me, because I'm not really a person that likes super structured stuff, I guess. And- I don't know, I enjoyed it a lot more.”
Wolgemuth says that’s what Mount Everett’s Early College offerings are all about, especially for a generation raised in a culture of endless war, cultural chaos, and existential threats.
“When students have the opportunity to start exploring ideas and start interacting with information, they realize, one, that they can expand themselves, and that they can do problem solving, that perhaps before it was just, a problem is too big, they can't do anything," he said. "They find out about ways to move forward in a world that seems to be coming to a grinding stop.”
