Cassandra Woodbeck would have been a young mother without a Grade 12 diploma or a clear plan for her future if it wasn’t for her high school principal.
The 19-year-old left high school in 2009 with a Grade 11 education to take care of her now one-year-old son. Woodbeck admits that after leaving high school, outside of taking care of her newborn, she wasn’t sure what she would do with her life.
"I didn’t really have any plans," Woodbeck said. "I was just going to have the baby and take it from there."
The high school’s principal contacted Woodbeck about the dual-credit program the school board offered through the School-College-Work Initiative. The program allows students to earn credits toward both their high school diploma and the college course they hope to enroll in after graduating Grade 12.
Participating in the program allowed Woodbeck to graduate from high school with all the required credits. It has also giving her a three-credit head start in the culinary arts program she hopes to later graduate from.
"I am extremely happy that I was able to finish my (high school) education," she said. "And now I’m just looking forward to college next year."
Woodbeck said she expects to graduate from the college program in 2011 and hopes to find work within the field soon after.
The 19-year-old SCWI participant told her story during a news conference at Confederation College Friday. The media conference was organized to allow Confederation College representatives, several area school boards and a pair of students help announce a $1.29-million provincial investment with MPPs Michael Gravelle (Lib. Thunder Bay – Superior North) and Bill Mauro (Lib. Thunder Bay – Atikokan).
The additional $1.29 million will help the college offer 28 dual-credit programs for the 2010-‘11 school year through SCWI. Many people at the news conference called that a significant increase from the eight dual-credit programs offered this past school year.
Bob McEwan, Confederation College’s SCWI co-ordinator, said the increased funding will allow the program to serve as many as 600 students for the 2010-’11 school year.
"This can increase the number of school boards offering dual-credit programming," McEwan said. "We were able to increase (the number of dual-credit programs) by eight and definitely this funding is an important part of that."
He added that the demand for these kinds of programs has been rising steadily among area school boards. McEwan also said that the program is a major boon to smaller school boards that can’t offer a lot of the courses that they would like to.
"Now that they can offer some college courses to high school students, it makes it that much easier for them and now that there is funding in place it is a windfall for them," he said.
