Early next year, some ESL students will have the opportunity to be able to move out of Greenwood High School into a more English-Learning driven school, formally named GEO International High School. They will be traveling each day to the annex at Warren Central. This new school will be made up of ESL students who have been in America for less than four years.

ESL students from both Greenwood and Warren Central have been invited to go to the new school instead of going to their current high school. One disadvantage of this new school is that the students who transfer will not be able to participate in extracurricular activities and KHSAA sports, this will cause many to turn away this opportunity because they are looking forward to playing sports and being in clubs throughout the year.

Mr. Dunn thinks that this new school will be a good thing for the ESL kids, who choose to go, because they will get a more intensive course of ESL classes as well as still learning the core content they need to. It focuses on more of the newcomer ESL students who haven’t been in the United States to learn English as long as some of the others have. The students will move at their own pace, so the students who really work hard and want to learn have the option of graduating early from high school.

ESL students who come to  America at a later age will also have the opportunity to go to this school, as long as they work hard, so that they can graduate on time. This will also be a project-based school instead of a credit-based school, like what we have at GHS. Project-based schools deal with real-world problems that are more engaging and complex.  Mr. Dunn said, “Even though we have a great ESL program and Warren Central has a great ESL program, this school will be better for the kids who want to go and excel in learning the English language.”

This school was influenced by a similar school that is in New York City. Since NYC has so many immigrants coming in they needed to separate ESL schools. This was to help teach immigrant students the English language faster. Some administrators from the new GIHS school went to New York to meet with the school administrators that run the school in NYC so they could see how the school was run and to figure out plans on how to model this new international school. The main classrooms, which will be about nine or ten, will be located in the annex off of Warren Central. This building will have its own administration and staff. It is estimated that since this is the first year that there will be 150-200 students enrolled in the school. Though administration hopes this number will expand over the years that the school is open.

Ms. Towe informed me that we do not have many students from Greenwood planning to attend this new school because there has not been enough information put out about it and it would leave a lot of students out of their comfort zone. She is also skeptical about how there will be no English-speaking students at this school because she believes that in order to better one’s English speaking and listening they need to be around native English speakers. Here are some comments from Greenwood’s own ESL students on GIHS: