Greenville's IB programs

By Anna Mitchell  

JULY 16, 2010 7:29 a.m. (0)

Click here to see a sample IB test

Patti Kolothekis credits the international baccaleaureate program at Travelers Rest High with changing her daughter’s life.

Rosie was 16 when the high school in northern Greenville County launched its IB diploma program. She was a quiet achiever, having risen to second in her class, but little exposed to international culture and ideas, her mother said.

Last week she graduated from College of Charleston with an A average, a highly coveted invitation to dentistry school at MUSC, a year abroad in South America and a minor in Spanish bolstered by her IB foreign language credits.

“People are, like ‘TR?’” Kolothekis said. “They think there aren’t that many smart kids and ‘how can you compare TR to Riverside?’ It bothered me.”

Most parents and educators rave about the program. Still, some others have questioned whether the nearly $1.1 million cost of maintaining IB status at 12 schools – four elementary schools, four middle schools and four high schools – is worth the expense during a dire budget year.

Despite repeated requests, school officials have produced little data – from enrollment in IB classes to pass rates on the IB exams – to justify the programs.

The world comes to TR

IB was created 42 years ago in Geneva, Switzerland, for internationally mobile students in search of a standardized, college-prep education. Today more than a third of the 3,000 IB schools worldwide are in the United States, said Drew Deutsch, director of IB in the Americas. The number of IB schools has consistently doubled every five years, he said.

Beyond taking an exam for college credit, IB programs provide a deep understanding of the curriculum through long papers, lab experiments, community service and examination of original documents. Every student takes a course called Theory of Knowledge, which introduces them to world religions, culture and history. Students in Tom Rogers’ IB design tech class at Southside spent a recent afternoon building a radio telescope controlled by a GPS unit and a cell phone.

“I wrote a 10-page paper on Judaism, a religion I originally knew next to nothing about,” said Erika Baldwin, a Travelers Rest IB student now at Furman. “My teacher, Ms. Victoria Chase, was by far the best teacher I’ve ever had.”

Greenville County Schools established an IB program at Southside High in 1988, the first public school in the state to do so and before the fees were instituted. Known for its high-achieving students, appeal to international families and a basis in critical thinking skills, its advocates say the program raises the bar for students and teachers throughout the school, even outside IB.

“It’s not a preppy school with a lot of the cliques,” said Pat Wolff, the outgoing IB Parent Council president at Southside. “The pressure among IB kids is to get good grades, not to drink or part or other stuff.”

Wolff’s children are German, and they wanted the ability – only afforded to those with an IB diploma – to attend a German university.

“It’s attractive to parents of nerds,” Wolff added, laughing.

Greenville County school board members decided by 2003 the program ought to be extended to rural areas too far for the Southside commute or multi-hour bus ride.

Debi Bush said she didn’t want her son, now 29 and a Duke-educated scientist, driving congested Highway 25 every day. He stayed at Travelers Rest, but she remembered this choice years later when she became a school board member.

“The opportunities should not have been limited for students because of their zip code,” she said.

By 2005, IB was established in three other high schools well outside the city of Greenville – Travelers Rest, Greer and Woodmont – and their feeder elementary and middle schools. The IB programs provided a level of rigor and prestige previously unknown.

Measure of success

Still, gains in participation have been modest.

Through the summer of 2009, two diplomas had been awarded to Greer students, six to Woodmont students, seven to Travelers Rest students and 337 to Southside students.

School officials could not provide The Journal with statistics on how many students district-wide enroll in the rigorous high-school IB courses – a common measure for the program’s success. They also did not know what the pass rate was for those taking IB exams.

The last time the district’s coordinator for IB and magnet school programs was asked to present a report on the program was 2006. At that time, diploma enrollment was 22 at Greer, 20 at Travelers Rest, 52 at Woodmont and 71 at Southside.

Debbie Carrero, the district’s IB coordinator, said many hundreds more students have taken IB courses, but she didn’t know how many.

The Journal has also learned the district is undertaking an internal review of the program but officials refused to provide details on what aspects of the program are being examined or their results.

“The administrative review was part of the budgeting process and is an internal process,” district spokesman Oby Lyles said in an e-mail. “A formal evaluation will be presented to the Board this school year.”

Bush said the district wants to see what programs are working well and why.

“Now when I talk to students at TR, I ask if they are taking IB courses and they say, ‘They are so hard,’” Bush said. “That’s the perception. That those classes are for brainiacs.”

The school district covers the costs of IB course tests – nearly $90,000 – and covers the $103,000 bill for dues. The program’s remaining $872,000 covers staffing – IB coordinators, teachers, a secretary at Southside and some training.

Anecdotally, the program’s results seem mixed.

Wolff said she knows more than 300 students enroll in IB classes there, and more than 30 earned the prestigious IB diploma this summer after passing all their exams and doing a series of projects. The Southside program alone draws students from Anderson and Oconee counties willing to pay tuition.

Woodmont’s Darryl Imperati said when he arrived in 2007, no students earned an IB diploma. He’s vigorously recruited kids for IB classes ever since.

“I am pleased to tell you that this past year, 2009, we had six diploma candidates and five got it,” he said. “I was so thrilled. In the class of 2010, we had maybe 11 candidates, and we anticipate every one of them receiving a diploma.”

Lou Lavely, principal at Travelers Rest High, said IB enrollment at his school ranges from five students in IB Spanish to as many as 20 in IB theater. He wasn’t sure about total enrollment but said his school has seen a small increase in students taking IB exams or going for the full diploma.

Greer’s principal, Marion Waters, did not respond to requests for an interview.

Dire straits

With budgets slashed, all the high schools have cut the full-time coordinator position to half-time, sharing that person with a feeder middle school or, in Southside’s case, having him also teach science.

Parents have worried that gutting the IB programs would make them ineffective.

“Given my fears about whether or not the district is committed to sustaining IB programs at Southside or anywhere, I have already started looking into alternatives for my daughter should Southside no longer be offering IB,” said Southside parent Savita Nair, who drives her child from the Travelers Rest area to attend the well-established program.

Imperati said the IB World School badge at Woodmont High drew him to apply from out of state to be principal at the school.

With class sizes increasing by one student per class this coming fall and more than $120,000 cut out of Woodmont’s operating budget, Imperati said, he’s worked harder this year to justify the ongoing costs of IB. No class can be smaller than 21 students, he said, and enrollment in all IB classes hovers around 100.

“There are some IB classes that have enrollments of seven or eight kids, but we have combined them where appropriate with AP classes,” he said. “If IB curriculum is delivered to all the kids, the AP kids have done well.”

Maintaining IB at each of the three rural high schools costs $125,477 a year.

Some parents have suggested the program be consolidated again at Southside, where teaching hundreds more students costs about double.

“I never understood why they wanted to start little programs that suck away resources,” Wolff said.

Deutsch, the head of IB in the Americas, said few districts have left IB in part because of the high cost of reinstating the program: a two-year process, $20,000 fee and thousands of dollars more in teacher training.

“The largest expense is in the startup phase,” he said.

AP and IB classes, Imperati said, are the only leg up a public-school student has against the hundreds of thousands of top students graduating every year from schools in India and China.

“Without a doubt, it’s well worth the money,” Imperati said.

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