LTCC and LTUSD boards holding joint meeting Tuesday

The Lake Tahoe Community College and Lake Tahoe Unified School District Boards of Trustees will hold a joint meeting on Tuesday, March 24.

During the meeting, two people from the Los Rios Community College will provide an overview of "Get Focused, Stay Focused!" a career and educational course that LTUSD officials hope to bring to South Tahoe High next year.

Based on the principal of preparing students for today's workforce, every entering freshmen within the Community College system in California should have an education plan by the end of their first year but the planning for it starts early on in high school.

The Get Focused…Stay Focused! Initiative supports this recommendation and expands on this vision in the following unique ways according to their website:

- All area high school students will arrive at college with complete career and education plans.
-These plans are meaningful and therefore motivational because they are well-thought-out, personalized, and consistently planned over four years (138 hours of exposure to the course material).
-Students will have gained the skills necessary to become self-sufficient researchers and planners of their own futures.
-Course materials meet the new Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and therefore will help provide capacity-building for instructors as they transition to the new requirements and teaching methods that are shown to promote student learning.

The discussion should be an interesting one about the new opportunity for launching a dual enrollment system between LTUSD and LTCC where students can start earning college credits as early as ninth grade. The program is modeled after the Freshman Transition Initiative of the George Washington Universities, Santa Barbara City College's Dual Enrollment Freshman Transition (DEFT) course and the proposed Progression in Education Model (PEM) for grades 10 - 14.

The joint meeting will be held in the College Board Room, One College Drive from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. The LTUSD Board will then reconvene at their normal board room at 6:45 p.m. The LTCC Board will continue on in their board room until 8:00 a.m.