EVERETT — A display in the Sno-Isle Tech Skills Center foyer asks, “Got math?”
It might seem an odd question to the more than 800 high school juniors and seniors taking courses ranging from fashion and merchandising to welding at the south Everett campus.
Low passing rates on the state’s math WASL are forcing Sno-Isle and other skills centers to push math or lose enrollment.
The reason: A state law passed last spring requires students who have not passed the math portion of the 10th-grade Washington Assessment of Student Learning to keep taking math classes until they graduate. Statewide, nearly half of all seniors have not yet passed the math WASL.
At Sno-Isle, enrollment dropped by about 100 from last fall to 812 students, and Sno-Isle director Steve Burch suspects that is largely due to the new math requirement. Two years ago, there were more than 1,000 students.
“We don’t want to be sitting here crying wolf, but we think the wolf is out there,” Burch said.
Three years ago, Sno-Isle had nearly 2,000 applications and enrollment of more than 1,000 students.
This fall, the candidate pool dropped to 1,500.
Burch is seeing a shrinking pool of candidates just when trades and industries are saying they need high school graduates with the skills offered at Sno-Isle. Students who might otherwise attend Sno-Isle have been taking remedial courses at their home school.
Half of the state’s 10 regional skills centers faced a sharp cut in enrollment this fall.
Many are scrambling to offer math courses on-site and convince high schools that students will learn math in the half-day they attend vocational and technical classes at Sno-Isle.
Math credits can be earned at career centers if local school districts determine that they are equivalent to math courses.
Students must take math until they pass the WASL or graduate from high school. It becomes mandatory for graduation in 2013.
“We can help all kids with math if we are given the opportunity,” Burch said.
At Sno-Isle, 13 of 19 courses include varying levels of math.
Watah Rikabi, 18, an Everett High School senior who attends Sno-Isle, is convinced that a robotics, electronics and computers course and a two-day WASL prep class at the skills center helped him pass the math WASL. Rikabi failed the math exam as a sophomore and passed as a junior.
“Without the class and without the math we do in the class, I probably would have failed it again,” he said. “It’s an electronics class. It’s pretty much math-based. It’s all equations, problem solving and logic.”
“We actually see the math,” he added. “We actually see how the math applies to a circuit or something.”
Besides examining and promoting how math is applied in existing classes, Sno-Isle could add math classes, a new wrinkle that has helped at least three skills centers elsewhere in the state increase their enrollments.
At the Clark County Skills Center in Vancouver, Wash., enrollment jumped by more than 50 students this fall in part because the school added a math program that teaches concepts tested on the WASL.
Students in those classes get two hours of vocational training and one hour of math each day. Classmates who don’t need the math credit get three hours of training.
“It’s working,” said Dennis Kampe, who has worked at the skills center for 25 years, the past 17 as its director. “It’s working for 40 students anyway.”
Demand exceeds slots, and the center could add an after-school program next fall in applied math that students might encounter on job sites.
“We are part of the educational system, and our goal collectively in education is to get students over the bar,” Kampe said. “You change your business plan to meet the need of your customers.”
Reporter Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446 or stevick@heraldnet.com.
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