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By Ben Lumpkin 

Daily Planet Staff 

Parents packed into the Martin Luther King Middle School library Tuesday night to hear Berkeley High School freshman counselors talk about some common pitfalls that affect Berkeley High ninth-graders. 

“The big difference between high school and middle school is that there is more freedom in high school,” Berkeley High School Freshman Counselor Susan Werd told the group, explaining that one of the first “red flags” for students struggling with the transition into high school is absence from class. 

Berkeley High Principal Frank Lynch is developing a plan for a “closed campus” for freshman beginning next year to deal specifically with the temptation students have, when they leave campus for lunch, to simply stay in downtown Berkeley with friends and miss the remainder of their classes. 

Under the proposed “closed campus” policy, freshman would be required to stay on campus all day next year. The restriction would expand to include sophomores in the fall of 2002. 

Werd and Freshman Counselor Jennifer Antonuccio are traveling to each of Berkeley’s three middle school campuses this week to help eighth graders sign up for their first year of classes at Berkeley High. Their talk Tuesday focused on how to make sure new students develop a curriculum plan for their four years at Berkeley High that meets there own needs, the schools graduation requirements, and eligibility requirements for entering the University of California system. 

“We want kids to know that the choices they make in the ninth-grade can impact them when they’re seniors,” Werd said.  

A Berkeley High senior who suddenly decides he or she wants to attend a four year college might find they aren’t eligible because they didn’t take at least two years of foreign language, or three years of math, she warned. 

“We can’t applaud you enough for being here tonight,” Werd told the parents.  

“We need to have you encourage them,” she said. “They don’t read the information on their own.” 

Werd warned parents to take into consideration the children’s performance in middle school before signing them up for challenging high school classes. Too often kids are “setup” to fail, she said, which can have negative emotional consequences for freshman already struggling to adapt to their lowly status at the bottom of the high school social structure. 

“If your kid is struggling with math in the eighth grade, don’t have them take a foreign language freshman year (at BHS),” Werd said, explaining that a student’s performance in math is often a good indicator of how they’ll perform in foreign languages. 

Antonuccio said Latin and Honors Geometry are two of the most demanding courses available to freshman and should be reserved for the most dedicated of students. “They’re the kind of classes that a student really needs to want to take,” she said. 

In response to parents’ questions, Werd explained two of Berkeley High’s Small Learning Communities, programs within Berkeley High where selected students can work with a dedicated network of teachers throughout their four years at Berkeley High. 

The Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS) program gives students long-term projects where they use modern communication tools to promote social justice. In the Common Ground program teachers work closely with students on projects that promote ecological literacy. In both small learning communities, teachers work to integrate the program’s curriculum into students’ regular core curriculum classes at Berkeley High.  

Students must apply for admission to the programs prior to their freshman year, but Werd emphasized that students of varying academic backgrounds are accepted. One of the underlying principles for these communities, she said, is that students of diverse backgrounds will learn from each other if brought together in one small, cohesive learning community. 

“What they’re looking at is students who do really well and students who don’t do real well,” Werd said of the admissions process. “If you put those two kids together they have skills they can share with each other.”