Education
BY HANNAH JOHNSON
PISD board talks attendance zones
Celina ISD OKs 2024-25 academic calendar Celina ISD students can expect up to 30 days off in the 2024-25 school year. The district’s board of trustees approved the academic calendar Nov. 13. The fall semester is 84 days and the spring semester will have 89. Sorting out the details The school year starts on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. Thanksgiving break for students will be Nov. 25-29, while teachers will have professional devel- opment Nov. 25-27. Christmas break will start with an early release day Dec. 20 with students returning Jan. 7, 2025. Spring break will span March 17-21. Additional staff and student holidays include: • Columbus Day • Martin Luther King Jr. Day Two emergency closure days are scheduled for April 18 and April 21. The last day of school will be May 23, 2025. Prosper ISD reports growth in AP, dual credit More Prosper ISD students are taking Advanced Placement and dual credit courses than ever before. The number of students taking Advanced Place- ment courses has increased 123% from the 2018-19 school year, said Seth Rutledge, PISD’s director of advanced academics, during an Oct. 16 board meeting. For dual credit courses, enrollment has grown 140% since the 2019-20 school year, he said. “The growth in AP and dual credit is tremen- dous,” Rutledge said. Diving in deeper In 2019, 892 students took an AP course, Rut- ledge said. This number grew to 1,986 students in the 2022-23 school year. During that time, 5,122 AP courses were taken, according to district data. “Our students are seeking out those opportu- nities, and our teachers are getting them in and keeping them in,” Rutledge said. “Not only are we getting more kids in, they’re getting more oppor- tunities for college credit.”
Advanced academic courses 32 19 27 Advanced placement courses Core dual credit courses Career and technical courses
Prosper ISD attendance zones are expected to look different in the 2024-25 school year. The overview Two new schools are opening in August, creating a change in attendance boundaries, Deputy Superintendent Greg Bradley said at a Nov. 13 meeting. Changes will be done in the southern por- tion of PISD. The affected schools include: • Spradley Elementary School
SOURCE: PROSPER ISD/COMMUNITY IMPACT
For dual credit courses, PISD works with Collin College. Students are able to take college courses with the college’s professors and graduate with a high school and college transcript, he said. In the 2019-20 school year, there were 439 students in dual credit classes. By the beginning of the 2023-24 school year, this has grown to over 1,000 students, Rutledge said. “Our students really have the opportunity to get ahead here,” he said. Check this out For the past two summers, any students from schools that Collin College partners with for dual credit courses have had the opportunity to take two college courses—equivalent to six credit hours—for free, Rutledge said.
• Hays Middle School • Rogers Middle School
“While we do our best to draw maps that make sense, we understand that we can’t know every story in Prosper ISD.”
GREG BRADLEY, PROSPER ISD DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT
Celina ISD sees increase in bilingual program The number of non-English-proficient stu- dents in Celina ISD has increased about 208% Emergent bilingual students
from the 2020-21 school year to 2023-24. “We’re seeing quite a bit of growth really quickly,” Emergent Bilingual Coordinator Vanessa Hurtado-Jaramillo said during at an Oct. 16 board meeting where she gave a presen- tation on the program. The background The district’s bilingual program is called the dual language one-way program, Hur- tado-Jaramillo said. Students are classified as non-English-proficient and are learning Spanish and English at the same time, she said. Prekindergarten through first grade students have reading and language, science and social studies taught in Spanish. English as a second language program is meant to make academic content accessible to English learners. Diving in deeper In the 2020-21 school year, 243 students were
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2020-21
School year 2021-22 2022-23 2023-24*
*AS OF AUGUST
SOURCE: CELINA ISD/COMMUNITY IMPACT
classified as emergent bilingual, according to district data. This has grown by 208% at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year. The percentage of students classified as emergent bilingual across the district has grown from 6.4% in the 2020-21 school year to 16.2% in the beginning of the 2023-24 school year, according to district data.
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PROSPER - CELINA EDITION
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