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December 13, 2007
Security starts at school?BoardBuzz was intrigued by this front page article in USA Today earlier this week. It seems a high school in Maryland is now offering a homeland security program to teach students who are interesting in pursuing that field after school. Students seem to get a lot out of it, and the school and program, the first of its kind, are attracting attention.
"We're trying to set high expectations," says student Megan Bell, 15. "We don't want to be known as just the school with the good football team. Now we have homeland security."Other school districts are taking notice. [Frank] Mezzanotte says he's been contacted by individual schools and education departments in more than a half-dozen states.
"Joppatowne broke the ground for all of us," says Lise Foran of Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Maryland. Next fall, Meade High School will begin a Homeland Security program. "We're following in Joppatowne's footsteps."
And on Wednesday, Mezzanotte will be in Las Vegas, where he has been asked to give a presentation on the program to the Association for Career and Technical Education annual conference.
Some question whether the program will teach students to be open-minded about the government's national security policies, given its goal of getting kids jobs with defense and homeland security contractors and the military. The liberal magazine Mother Jones dubbed Joppatowne "the academy of military-industrial-complex studies."
BoardBuzz thinks this is a great way to give students "real world" exposure in high school and prepare them for world we live in. Critics argue that the program could be used to indoctrinate students, but the connections that it allows for students to draw between their classroom and the world in which they live are invaluable. We think Megan Bell, a student at the school expresses it best, "I look forward to homeland security. It's good to learn something new and be able to connect it to something else."
Posted December 13, 2007 2:36 PM | Curriculum | Students
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