City's 'Academies' program gets mixed reviews By Jeff Hart GAINESVILLE - Amy Parks, parent to two children in the Gainesville school system, said the city's planned "Academies of Choice" looks good on paper and she's behind it - for now. "Well, I have to be - for now - because I want to be supportive, I'm open to it," Parks said after the city unveiled the plan for the first time publically Tuesday at Enota Elementary. "On paper it looks good, but I want to see the meat of the plan once it's finished. If we don't like what we see I would hope that the city would listen to the parents on what we're looking for. But it looks good so far." Ten more public meetings are planned over the next two months with a parental survey to be taken in November. The city's plan is to have each of the five elementary schools offer a curriculum of choice for each student on top of the core curriculum. Parents will initially have five "academies" - Core Knowledge, International Baccalaurete, Fine Arts, Exploration and Multi Intelligences - to choose from. Parents can switch schools at the end of each school year. Terilynn Brock, however, had some fundamental problems with the initial plan. "Are we supposed to test our kindergarten kids to find out what their interests are?" she said. "That seems a little young but I haven't heard everything. But I'm not sure right now. "And, some of the presentations were much stronger than others and there seemed to be a lot more teacher support for some schools than for others. I know we have more presentations coming on this, but I would like to see some serious roundtable-type meetings where parents can ask questions and voice concerns." Assistant Superintendent and lifelong Gainesville resident and student Shirley Whitaker said it's a positive and innovative move forward for the growing city system. "I lived here all my life, went to school here, and five generations of my family went to school here and I have never been more excited than I am right now," Whitaker said. Dr. Steven Ballowe, who implemented a similar system in Hilton Head, S.C., seven years ago said it's the coming trend in education. "A lot more systems are looking at this type of thing because they are starting to realize that the needs of students are different than they were when we grew up," Ballowe said. "We'll be one of just a handful of systems nationwide to have this kind of program but I think it will be the norm in years to come. For those who think we'll be sacrificing the basics, that's not the case. They'll still get the basics but with enhanced opportunites. "In the past, if you had someone who was a mechanical genious but didn't have a lot of book smarts, they flunked out without given any help for the future. If they had a program like this that let them choose a curriculum for mechanical engineering-type courses they would have passed and been a lot more interested. That's what we're trying to do - keep kids interested while learning."