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Deer Creek
The Deer Creek Board of Education Monday approved a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Central Oklahoma for services related to concurrent course offerings for Deer Creek High School.
Superintendent Jason Perez told the school board that UCO President Todd Lamb approached Deer Creek about creating a partnership between the school district and UCO.
“I think he was just in the (UCO president) position and five minutes later he was reaching out saying, hey, we need to have a meeting because I don't like that UCO is not partnering with Deer Creek with concurrent services for our students, we have a lot of them that take concurrent classes,” Perez said. “We were happy to meet. Admittedly, we did tell him right up front that we were really pleased with the services that Rose State College has offered over the past several years, and we didn't really see a need to change at this point. He asked what were the things that we needed in order to potentially make a switch.”
Perez said an agreement with UCO was reached.
“We will work exclusively with the University of Central Oklahoma to provide course offerings for our high school juniors and seniors. And the University of Central Oklahoma is going to help us out quite a bit. They're going to provide a dedicated UCO advisor to program participants, which will be a huge relief for our counseling core there at the high school,” he said.
Perez said Deer Creek covers the tuition for program participants through tuition waivers.
“In addition to that, and this is something that's going to be key for our families here in Deer Creek, is that students will be responsible for the cost of instructional fees at $50 per credit hour, which currently they're paying $70 to $80 per credit hour. It's going to be a savings to our families here too,” Perez said. “They're also going to provide a staff or faculty member to act as a classroom monitor during designated time windows when regular concurrent classes are not being held so our students who don't have transportation to leave campus during that time will have a place to be able to go and supervision that we won't have to necessarily provide to our faculty to do that.”
Perez said he was excited about the opportunity to bring Deer Creek concurrent students and partner back with UCO.
“They're still going to be just like Rose State, they're going to provide the services here on our campus, but I do see the potential for even more growth,” she said. “UCO has an amazing forensic science institute and I'm really excited to see how we can partner to really drive that program to our kids because they get excited about the forensic program that we offered here at the high school and the one at UCO is forensics on steroids.”