GRAND FORKS — A career and college readiness program available at a number of Grand Forks schools is intended to close achievement gaps.
Coordinator Katie Arthur said Advancement Via Individual Determination, available in five out of the 17 district schools, gives students unique opportunities to prepare for life after high school.
“It’s a school-wide system to help close the opportunity gap,” she said, “to help all students prepare for college and career readiness.”
At the elementary level, Arthur said AVID focuses on developing skills in writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization and reading, otherwise known as WICOR strategies. She said the overall goal is to increase the rigor of students’ classes.
At the middle and high school level, AVID continues to be implemented with hopes of increasing rigor, but it also offers students a specialized elective course for which they must apply and interview.
The elective course has a mixed curriculum, with half of the coursework focusing on developing WICOR skills to help students if they choose to pursue higher education, while the other half of the course focuses on students’ individual learning strategies.
“There’s a lot of metacognition about how they learn best,” Arthur said.
Arthur said AVID programs are primarily for students who may have untapped potential.
“It’s very much for the student who’s in the academic middle, who maybe has unlearned potential,” she said. “They don’t quite know what they can achieve, and the AVID elective class pulls that potential out of them and really exposes them to a lot and helps them develop a plan to get to where they want to go.”
AVID does this not only with elective curriculum, Arthur said, but also with community service opportunities, field trips and guest speakers.
“We have guest speakers come in from different career opportunities just to expose them to a wide range of things that maybe not everybody gets to be exposed to,” she said.
The program is available at the participating schools: Lake Agassiz Elementary, Wilder Elementary, Lewis and Clark Elementary, Valley Middle School and Central High School. For students in seventh to 11th grade, there are two elective classes available at each grade level, serving approximately 40 students. All sixth-graders at Valley Middle School will be enrolled in an AVID course.
While Arthur said that ideally, AVID programming would be district-wide, current funding constraints limit the number of schools AVID can be offered in. She said AVID’s current placement helps support equity in the district.
“It gives more opportunities for students on the north end of town,” she said. “And I think that that is where it is most effective.”
Arthur said there is a lot of excitement from participating schools and students. She said the intentional programming and strong AVID staff, helps the program have the impact it does today.
“There’s a lot of motivation and excitement and passion with AVID,” she said. “It’s exciting stuff, and I think it’s not anything new or inventive, it’s what we’ve done and what we believed in. It’s just very intentional work and it’s put into a system that makes sense … to help move the needle, to close the achievement gap.”
Sophia is the K-12 education reporter for the Grand Forks Herald.