'College Now' program gives high school students a chance to earn early associate's degree

When Jacinda Floyd first heard about the “College Now” program at Westmoreland County Community College during her freshman year at Franklin Regional Senior High School, she said she “kind of overlooked it.”

“I was thinking, ‘I’m a freshman and have a lot of time to go before college,’” Floyd said. “But my mom said, ‘You’re going to do this,’ and I started taking classes during the second half of my sophomore year.”

By taking a combination of college-level courses online, at FR and at the community college, Floyd and classmate Grant Gibson will be the first two Panther students to graduate with both an associate’s degree and a high school diploma.

“I sat down with Tameka King- Buchak, the director at the college’s Westmoreland-Murrysville center, and she explained that I’d be getting a liberal arts degree,” Floyd said. “I wanted to go into business, so a lot of my courses were related to that — principles of management, intro to logic, things like that.”

King-Buchak said the program, a partnership that WCCC started in 2014, gives students “an option to kind of springboard and get a start ahead of where they’d normally be both financially and mentally, as a way to prepare them for what’s next.”

Twenty-four school districts, including 17 in Westmoreland County, have joined the partnership in some form, King-Buchak said, although only a few have adopted the focus on earning an associate’s degree while still in high school.

The Ligonier Valley School District has taken full advantage of the program, partnering with WCCC during the 2015-16 school and helping 71 students earn their associate degrees, with 14 on track to do so this year including senior Abigail Mack, 18, of Ligonier.

“My older brother wanted to do it, but for his field, he wasn’t able,” Mack said. “He told me that it was one of the best things the high school offered, though.”

Mack wants to be a high school biology teacher and enrolled in the program with the intention of taking science-focused classes. An associate degree in liberal arts, however, also meant taking additional classes that would give her a well-rounded introduction to post-high school education no matter the field she ultimately chose.

“I ended up really enjoying the English classes,” she said. “I took an advanced composition class and got to write a paper on a topic — prison system justice in the U.S. — that I’m really passionate about.”

Now, Mack is likely to enter her first year of college as a junior, at least on paper.

“One of my friends who’s graduating college next spring was in high school last year,” she said. “I could potentially be out of college with two degrees and a master’s equivalent in three years.”

Mack wants to attend Susquehanna University.

The program is meant to challenge participants, King-Buchak said.

“You have to find the right student, because it’s a rigorous program,” she said.

Franklin Regional parent Shelley Gibson said that was the experience for her son Grant, a senior who started taking College in High School classes the summer after his sophomore year.

“What kind of drew us to the program was, Grant didn’t really know what he wanted to do after high school, whether it would be a four-year program or something else,” she said. “But he’d be able to take college classes, earn an associate’s degree in liberal arts, and it would give him something to lay the groundwork for his future.”

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though.

“We had a lot of roadbumps along the way,” Gibson said. “It was a real learning challenge for me as a parent, for Grant as a student and for Tameka at WCCC. I think future students will have an easier time, but for Grant and Jacinda to be able to finish it successfully speaks volumes to the effort everyone had to put in to make it work.”

Floyd said she was a little nervous at first, “but being able to take courses related to my major made me realize how different high school and college are.”

“I honestly loved all the classes I was in,” she said. “It seemed like much less of a chore than high school.”

Grant Gibson said he plans to transfer his credits to the University of Pittsburgh.

“I was looking into it, and I think 11 of my 19 classes will transfer, and I can put those toward a computer science degree,” he said. “There’s a good job market for it, and it’s something I enjoy.”

Completion of the course requires students to maintain a 2.0 in all of their college-level courses, and must complete a minimum of 60 credits. WCCC also has articulation agreements with several four-year schools that transfer the associate degrees into numerous baccalaureate programs.

“Being part of the program has opened up a lot of opportunities,” Mack said. “My sophomore year, I got to go on a field trip and learned about teaching at Saint Vincent. I’ve talked to a lot of other students in the program, and the classes go a lot deeper than a lot of what you experience in high school.”

King-Buchak said that’s exactly the outcome she’d like for all the College in High School participants.

“I love seeing the growth in the students,” she said.

For more on the College in High School program, see Westmoreland.edu and enter “college now” in the search box.