AVID and The Clemente Course in the Humanities: An Inspiring Collaboration

By Cate Praggastis, AVID Elective Teacher & Coordinator, East High School

I remember the phone call that came almost two years ago – a woman from the Utah Humanities Council had been asking around and heard that East High’s AVID system was vibrant and growing. She wanted to know if we could meet – she had an idea she wanted to share.  Over the next school year, I attended numerous meetings (way more than I truly wanted to) as the idea of bringing The Clemente Course in the Humanities to East was explored.  As responsible, involved professionals, we all look for new ways to reach our students, ways to connect them to their learning; the more I learned about Clemente, the more I thought it would be worth the effort.  I soon realized that AVID, a system designed to prepare students for college success, would fit with Clemente, but the fit wasn’t always comfortable.  In the end however, the AVID/Clemente collaboration was definitely worth it.

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Preventing an Elite Program from Becoming Elitist

By Liz Mizrahi, District AVID Coordinator for Bellevue School District, in collaboration with the entire Interlake AVID/IB TeThe AVID/TOK Team from Interlake High School with Liz Mizrahi, District AVID Coordinatoram: Maria Frieboes-Gee, Michael O’Byrne, Alison Pendlebury, Marisa Corso, and Matt Daniels

Interlake High School’s Answer to the IB and AVID Dilemma

Interlake High School’s AVID/Theory of Knowledge (AVID/TOK) class was born in a car ride from Portland to Seattle two years ago.  Interlake’s principal Maria Frieboes-Gee and IB Coordinator Michael O’Byrne were driving home after attending an IB conference.  Both Maria and Michael noticed similar troubling trends with IB and AVID at Interlake.  For one, even with Interlake’s seven period day, students could not take the AVID Elective class all four years of high school and complete their IB diploma. This meant that promising AVID students with the top grades and college prospects were forced to leave AVID in their crucial senior year to finish their IB diploma.  Secondly, IB was in danger of getting the reputation as an elitist program.  

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Course Placement: Why Do We Need to Understand the Process?

By Dr. Philip Bernhardt, Assistant Professor & Department Chair of Secondary Education, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Former AVID Teacher and Co-School Coordinator

In my current role as an education professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, I often talk with prospective teachers about the years I spent helping to develop, implement, and coordinate AVID at J.E.B. Stuart HS in Fairfax County, Virginia. In talking about AVID’s purpose and the reasons why it is vital for so many students and their families, I frequently share some of the challenges our site team encountered. One such challenge was ensuring AVID students were provided with consistent and equitable opportunities to enroll in advanced-level classes.

Our site team had a difficult time identifying and understanding the various processes being used within the school to recommend and assign students to advanced classes. It was not uncommon for teachers, even within the same subject area, to use different strategies and approaches to assign students to classes for the subsequent school year, and we had no idea how our feeder middle schools made 9th grade course enrollment decisions. As a result, ensuring the curricular pathway of each one of our AVID students was not always easy, and at times, efforts to accomplish this goal created conflict.

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AVID and IB: Success with a Schoolwide Approach

By Adria Tate, College Readiness Systems Manager, Denver Public Schools

AVID Center and International Baccalaureate (IB), have a strong working relationship between the two organizations, but there is often confusion in school districts on whether AVID and IB are competing or complementary.  To help schools develop their best practices for AVID and IB, I have spent the past several months interviewing educators at  8 AVID/IB high schools and 5 AVID/IB middle schools who are doing amazing work between their AVID and IB programs to better support student success. A pattern emerged with the most successful sites: AVID’s Schoolwide approach.

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Poverty, Privilege, and Academic “Othering”

By Yvonne Ortiz-Prince, Program Manager, AVID for Higher Education

I hail from a long line of strong women. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, my maternal grandmother grew up poor and received the equivalent of a 6th grade education. In search of greater financial opportunity, my grandparents decided to move to New York. Abuelito remained temporarily with their eldest son, so he could complete the school year. Abuelita rode on a steamship with their infant and toddler sons, speaking no English. When Abuelito and my eldest uncle arrived four months later, Abuelita had secured a job as a seamstress, as well as child care and furniture, in their modest railroad apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

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