Anderson New Technology High School
In 2001, the Anderson Union High School District (AUHSD) was one of two sites selected by the New Technology Foundation to replicate the New Technology High School program in Napa, California. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Replication Project develops additional schools in Northern California based on the Napa model, which combines teamwork and technology and provides a student-to-computer ratio of one-to-one. Technology is an integral part of the curriculum, which is problem and project based. Through this innovative curriculum, students are prepared to succeed at the university level. The emphasis on teamwork and collaboration in the classroom helps break down the social barriers that typify a traditional school. In 2001, The McConnell Foundation awarded a $500,000 grant to ANTHS for the purchase and renovation of a building for the school and to serve as matching funds in order to obtain a state matching grant.
ANTHS won the California Distinguished School Award in 2007.
Place-based Science & Community Mapping
In 2004, the Foundation made a $100,000 grant to Anderson New Technology High School (ANTHS) for a new science and community mapping curriculum. ANTHS, in partnership with the Department of Fish and Game, developed this innovative program, which seeks to integrate the traditional curricula of earth science, geography, biology, and chemistry.
What’s innovative about it? The learning takes place outside of the classroom at the Balls Ferry Wetlands in Anderson. Out in the field, students study animal and plant habitats, and water and soil composition and quality. Another facet of this program is the community mapping effort, plotting various habitats and wildlife using Geographical Information Services technology as a planning and mapping instrument.
In order to integrate the place-based science skills and the community mapping effort, ANTHS students, in the Spring of 2007, began exploring the Horsetown Clear Creek Preserve. Reading’s Bar, just across the stream from the preserve, was the site of the first recorded discovery of gold by white settlers in July 1848, only a few months before the historical gold discovery in Coloma. The community of Horsetown was a gold-mining hub in the late eighteen-forties and eighteen-fifties with a diverse population of Oregon settlers, Irish and Jewish immigrants, and Chinese workers. After two fires leveled the town and the gold was depleted, gold miners set out to find their fortunes elsewhere. Located a half mile east of the current Horsetown preserve, nothing of the town site remains.
It’s kind of neat to be studying
about California history and be able to go out to a site that is so close and so significant.
~ ANTHS
student
In addition to firsthand exploration of such a significant historical site, students have the opportunity to locate plant and animal species and note their positions using Global Positioning System (GPS) units. Soon the preserve and other Clear Creek locations, much of it managed by the Bureau of Land Management, will be linked by trails developed by the Western Shasta Resource Conservation District. New Tech students and teachers hope to apply their newfound skills to create interpretive brochures and to make displays that will help visitors understand the history of the local area and the types of animal and plant species to be found there. Working closely with land management agencies, the students will engage in conservation and informational projects.