During her Accelerating TN 2021 bus tour stop in Hamilton County last week, state education Commissioner Penny Schwinn discussed post-secondary pathways such as dual enrollment with school district and community business leaders.
Hamilton County Collegiate High School at Chattanooga State, a dual enrollment high school, serves as one of these pathways. Students earn high school diplomas and some earn transfer associate’s degrees, including recent graduate and incoming Harvard University freshman Sasha Hitachi-Kizziah.
Hitachi-Kizziah, 18, graduated from Collegiate High School in the fall as co-valedictorian and will attend Harvard for her bachelor’s degree followed by a one-year master’s program in flute performance at the New England Conservatory.
She came into Collegiate High School as a freshman and said she took a lot of humanities courses at the school, along with participating in the Global Scholars Honors Program and chamber music program. She said one reason she wanted to attend the school was to have enough time for both academics and music.
“I play music, I’m a flutist and something that was really important to me was having the time to practice, basically, and so in a more traditional school schedule, I didn’t really have the time that I wanted to dedicate to school on top of the practice that I needed to get to the level where I wanted to be,” Hitachi-Kizziah said. “So in seeing Collegiate, one of the things that was really appealing to me was the freedom and schedule that came with being a college student, essentially, but I was also very interested in taking classes at the school, because I think there is something to be said for taking classes with professors who are very passionate about the things that they are specialists in the classes that they’re teaching.”
Students can enter the school between grades 9 and 12 and earn about 60 college credit hours, with about half of students earning both a high school diploma and transfer associate’s degree, said Collegiate High School Principal Sonja Rich.
Admission to the school comes through an application process, and tuition at Chattanooga State costs around $500 per course. State-funded dual enrollment scholarships are available to cover the cost of some courses, Rich said, and the school helps students complete general education courses to get ahead in college.
“They learn how to do college, they learn how to seek out their professors, how to get help, how to be able to communicate with their professors, learn what the bursar’s office is, how to use the library for study skills,” Rich said. “I mean, you get all of that behind you before you actually go to a college or university, and then some of our students want to stay at Chattanooga State and do a nursing program or one of the other vet tech programs or some of those programs they have.”
At the onset of the pandemic, Chattanooga State, along with schools across the country, pivoted to a fully remote environment, staying that way in fall 2020 and spring 2021. Hitachi-Kizziah finished her final semester virtually and said it was sad to not be able to interact with classmates and professors.
College applications also presented a challenge in some ways, she said, since many schools waived testing requirements. The national trend of test-optional applications among colleges also appeared in Chattanooga-area schools.
Despite the challenges, Rich said this fall had the largest graduating class the school has seen at 73 students and that the school will return to face-to-face instruction in the fall.
“It was a challenge, definitely a challenge, because professors were having to learn how to use Zoom and WebEx and change their teaching format,” Rich said. “Students are probably more flexible, but it was still a challenge for students not to be in class with their professors, and we’re really excited about being back in class in the fall.”
Contact Anika Chaturvedi at achaturvedi@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6592.