The districts academies will not benefit students

The school district is going to implement academies for each high school in August. Central’s two academies will be leadership and performing arts. Including both of these, 16 pathways are available for freshmen to choose from.

Some of central’s pathways consist of the band pathway, costume design pathway, journalism pathway, and teaching as a profession pathway. These are only four of the options the school offers. Freshmen will be required to take a seminar to better help them make a decision.

Essentially, these academies are curriculums designed to help students decide which career field they want to pursue.

The academies at each high school present many more problems than benefits. It’s forcing young students to make a huge decision that will impact their lives.

Not only are our students forced to make a huge decision, but their options are very limited depending on the school they go to. This means that if an academy is more popular at a certain school it could become overpopulated. We already see these issues at some schools in the district without the academies. For example, we see this at the overpopulated Omaha South high school.

Another consequence of this program would be increased segregation in school populations. The district has declared that students on free/reduced lunch will not be eligible for busing to and from school. Not only does this force students into committing to further limited career paths they might have no interest in, but low-income students will also be forced to choose from very few high schools. This segregates schools by both income and race in a city already notorious for a segregation problem.

High school should be used as a time for self-exploration and discovery. Forcing a 14-year-old to decide what they want to do with their life is not only unrealistic, but unfair because it robs them of this experience. High school kids deserve time to learn who they are and what they want in their lives and, most importantly, time to be children. This decision is an incredible responsibility for a child who doesn’t know who they are or what they’ll want in 20 years, as well as a strain on the creativity of the teenage experience.