Somonauk students jump-start degrees

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Updated: February 7, 2012 8:02AM

An innovative partnership developed between Somonauk High School and Waubonsee Community College is expected to save students both time and money.

Beginning next school year, Somonauk High and WCC will offer concurrent enrollment courses for students who otherwise would enter college academically behind. The goal is to prevent students from having to take — and pay for — remedial courses covering topics they should have learned in high school.

Somonauk is one of just two high schools in the WCC area to offer such a catch-up program, but statistics show that the problem with college preparedness reaches far beyond the Somonauk school boundaries.

A survey by an education non-profit group showed that four out of five students taking remedial classes graduated from high school with a GPA above 3.0.

Despite these high marks, 16.2 percent of students attending WCC in 2010 were taking at least one remedial course. Nationally, that number is even higher.

According to a recent report by the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington, D.C.-based policy group, as many as one-third of college-bound students need to take some sort of remedial or developmental course upon enrollment.

At Somonauk High School, administrators hope their students will help lower those statistics.

“The new courses will provide opportunities for students to complete remedial coursework prior to graduation from high school, thus reducing the amount of coursework at the community college level while saving students hundreds of dollars in tuition costs,” said Somonauk High School Principal Chris Neidigh.

“This is a great opportunity to prepare more students to be college- and career-ready when they complete their high school education.”

Although Somonauk’s initiative is a step forward, remediation will never completely disappear. Remedial classes are consistently filled with recent high school grads with B or C averages who were unaware that for them, college wasn’t going to start right away.

The Alliance for Excellent Education report estimated that during the 2007-08 school year, college-level remediation programs cost Illinois $155 million.

With public higher education budgets tighter than ever, remediation competes with dollars for research and classes moving students toward a degree.