A charter school in southeast Albuquerque has been designated an Innovation Zone and will receive almost $500,000 of the $4 million in state funding to redesign how it instructs and prepares students for life after high school.
Health Leadership High School (HLHS), which provides instruction for careers in the healthcare industry, will use the money on programs, a new lab and equipment - and also to pay students an hourly wage to take classes, KRQE reported Aug. 3. Paying students to learn is a cornerstone of the Innovation Zone program and a "huge, huge incentive" for students, according to HLHS's Director of Curriculum Instruction and Assessment Meg Tokunaga-Scanlon.
“When students can actually see the impact of what they’re doing," Tokunaga-Scanlon said to KRQE, "added to with, 'I actually get paid while I’m trying this out,' I think that’s a huge, huge incentive for them to want to engage.”
Beginning with the fall semester, HLHS students will receive $12.50 per hour to attend classes in the healthcare field, KRQE reports, as a way to improve graduation rates and increase the number of future healthcare workers.
Providing students with financial support is intended to address financial challenges that can cause a student to leave school.
Tokunagao-Scanlon called the wages a "huge component" of the program's goal of empowering students by supporting families, according to KRQE.
“Because a lot of our students take care of their families and (are) sometimes a breadwinner, significant breadwinner in their family, this helps so much,” Tokunagao-Scanlon said. “I think that’s a huge component. We want to support families and know that it’s not just easy to ‘I can just go to an internship after school’ and so we really want to embed that in our school day.”
Project-based schools have a 97% student graduation rate, according to the New Mexico Public Education Department (PED). Attending school through to graduation benefits the community as well as the students, the PED reports.
“Students are getting paid to work in businesses," Elaine Perea, director of the PED's College and Career Readiness Bureau, said to KRQE, "and that partnership, with the placement and where the students are actually working, is an opportunity and an open door for businesses to see that there is a way into the high school."
In addition to two charter schools in Albuquerque, schools named to the Innovation Zone are in Alamogordo, Aztec, Hatch Valley, Hobbs, Las Cruces, Rio Rancho, Silver City and Zuni districts. The schools will be get between $150,000 to $750,000, according to KRQE.
