Short video transcript featuring administrators and students describing ED Corps High School in Franklin County, North Florida. The school serves a small rural community (~12,000 county population) and uses an experiential, environmental-focused, hands-on curriculum (including Spartina planting and a Conservation Corps) combined with an online/home-school-style academic program to re-engage students who struggled in traditional public schools.
Chapters
Franklin county is a very special and unique place. We're a rural community in North Florida. You know, only about 12,000 people in the whole county. We're one of the largest counties with the smallest population. In 2012, we made a conscious decision to begin investing in young people and to kind of build their confidence, build their skill set, create pathways for them to be more sustainable, for them to be able to have secure employment here in where they grew up. So we partnered with our local high school for the first three years, and we learned that while the public school system is fantastic, that a lot of our young people are unique and they're not the typical classroom kind of student, and they need something that's a different fit.
We have about 11 students now. We have an online curriculum 98% of the time through a program called Grade Results. We also have a partnership with our local DEP and they have a curriculum that centers in with our curriculum so our kids get an education about this beautiful area here we call home. We have wonderful students, wonderful teachers who have a passion for what they do with the kids. Our kids know that. So they know we're there for them and we care about them, and we give them the curriculum, but also life lessons. Spartina is a plant that is very vital in coastal restoration. So our students are learning about how to plant Spartina, how to split part time up. The whole world of Spartina. The beauty of it today is some of the boys that are part of the Conservation Corps, that were crew leaders, were once students at Ed Corps, and some of the students we currently have were students along with those students. So they see boys and girls that they sat in the classroom with, getting their work, get their diploma. They see those boys out here now as crew leaders, and that's a wonderful thing to see how they can grow from Ed Corps high schools. They choose to be a part of Conservation Corps. And it makes me, as the administrator, feel so proud to see the growth in these students.
I like this high school because it lets us. It lets our freedom and lets our creativity flow. Because us being out here, we're free and we're not locked up in a classroom. We're not locked up with 30 other students in just a classroom learning off of paper. We get to actually come out here.
And have hands on with EDCOR is different because it is very hands on with the environment. It's a really cool combination of both where we can do stuff that matters in our community and then also learn our education. I really like that. What I'm doing, even as a young person matters because I feel like when you're starting off, you're so young, it's kind of hard to get your footing and do stuff that matters. And I'm really grateful for the opportunity that EDCOR has given me. EdCorp was perfect because it's like homeschool curriculum in that I can work at my own pace, but I have all the help I need in a classroom and people to motivate me. And honestly, I don't know where I would be without Ed Corp. I felt like there was nothing else for me to do for my education and I was feeling really hopeless. But I'm really, really glad I found this place.
So before Ed Corp, I went to a public school. I had been going there for like 10 years and I was just in a very bad spot in my life and I definitely needed change. And I heard about this program and it just sounded like perfect for me. So I reached out and I got into this program and it's definitely helped me out so much compared to what I was going through at public school. At public school, it was a lot harder to get, you know, one on one time with your teacher or help. And you know, there's just so many kids and so many things going on. So at Ed Corps, you know, it's a lot smaller. You could like, anytime you need help, you need anything, you have a teacher right there for you. It's a better learning environment.
Honestly, I've heard people say that school choice does not work in a rural county. And I just don't understand how they can rephrase that. What do they mean? Because here in Franklin county it is working. We have parents that they don't make millions of dollars. They don't make tens of thousands of dollars either. We have parents that are unemployed. We have a mechanic, we have a nurse. We have ones that work with a food pantry. So their salaries are not huge. And as you know, school can be costly. Outfitting the child, the clothes, the supplies they need, the curriculum. If it's a private school, you pay for the tuition, the things of that nature. The scholarship program is wonderful for us with the scholarship, the step up for student scholarship, it has been a godsend for our students.
