By By JOHN EBY / Niles Daily Star
As Dennis Lundren, Berrien County Intermediate School District instructional technology director, explained to Dowagiac Rotarians Thursday noon at Elks Lodge 889, the accelerated four-year program admits 30 freshmen each year from 15 school districts.
Twenty-two to 24 will finish the center program because “the trend the past few years is to lose a student or two as juniors because they've had enough high school and they're ready for college.”
Or a few may steer into another path, such as creative writing.
Local districts provide transportation.
Students are accepted from private schools as well as public.
The 30 students were 40 percent female a decade ago. Today the population is half boys and half girls.
While they haven't been formally tracked after college, a student working for an investment firm survived the terrorist collapse of the World Trade Center towers in 2001. Another worked on cloning a cat in Texas.
Teamwork and communication are also emphasized. “Teams is how it happens out in the real world,” he explained. “We also want students to be able to communicate. For their applications, our students take their SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Test) as eighth graders. Until it changed this year, the top score on SAT was 1,600. Our students average 1,040 - eighth graders scoring well enough that some colleges would take them. We also look at math and science grades, English, clubs, but the first indicator is SAT. It's almost a perfect correlation. How they score is how they perform. Second is English and language arts. Even though they have a special interest in science,” expressing themselves will determine success in any field.
Seniors just finished group debate activities in biology, like stem cell research. Lundren said, quipping, “Maybe this year it should have been, are there cougars in Berrien and Cass counties? We expect them to take a position based on data and what they've learned about science because what we're really after is to make sure they can express that knowledge and discuss it. They'll go a long ways if they can do that.”
And center students go a long way. A member of Kalamazoo's first graduating class who ended up with a physics degree from Michigan Tech is now a programmer for Google, the $100 billion empire dominating the Internet.
Early in his 10-year association with the center, Lundgren taught computer programming fundamentals such as spread sheets and word processing. That material is dispatched in weeks instead of a semester as students move ahead on multi-media production, writing Web pages and navigating the Internet. There is even a robotics section.
While U of M, Michigan State and Western Michigan University are the three leading destinations for the two dozen who complete the rigorous experience, they could also hold their own at Harvard, Cal Tech, the University of Chicago or wherever.
A three-year study of college freshmen and college seniors determined “they felt very well-prepared, no matter where they were, and not only in science and math,” he said. “They'd been on campus and knew how to react with college professors. Ph.Ds aren't always reasonable, but they'd already learned how to deal with that. We know, too, that 70 percent of our students go into a math, science or computer-related field. Those who don't, we need lawyers who have good backgrounds in chemistry. The GPA of these students at these difficult schools is 3.4. Sixty percent of our students are going through in four years or less - many with double majors. If they go five or six, they leave with a master's degree. The schools send us great kids.”