Metro Schools is looking to help teenage students salvage a degree when they don’t have the grades to move on to high school, but are too old to hold back. A “bridge school” is opening in part of Nashville’s Cohn Building next month.
It’s fairly common to hear teachers complain of being handed teenage students whose reading and math abilities are years behind their grade-level.
Whitney Bradley is an English teacher at Whites Creek High, and says shuffling such kids along from middle school is hardly doing them a favor.
“Not only are they educationally behind but socially they’re behind, emotionally they’re behind, and often times those students either sink or swim. Some of them end up going to alternative schools; some of them drop out of high school.”
To try to keep that from happening, Metro’s Cohn School plans to enroll such students up through tenth grade. They’ll work in relatively small classes of a dozen or so. Officials say the school can take about 150 students – and that more than 600 are old enough and far enough behind to be eligible.
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