As part of a push to make Akins an “outstanding” campus, the school day will start earlier, end later and feature a flexible instructional period every day of the week.

These are just a few of the changes that students will learn more about when they start the 2015-2016 school year on Monday. It will be the first day that students have to show up at 8:55 a.m., and classes won’t end until 4:20 p.m.

Principal Brandi Hosack, who will begin her first full year as the top campus leader after being hired in April, sat down for an interview with The Eagle’s Eye to explain some of the new initiatives and reasons behind the changes.

Eagle’s Eye: How does it feel to begin your first full year as principal of Akins High School?

Brandi Hosack: “Its really exciting. I have so many ideas and so much energy. I want everybody to get started on the same foot and to move forward. I think we are at a really awesome time as far as the history of Akins goes  and this is our launching point for going from great to an outstanding school and this year is our year to start that.”

EE: Why did you decided to make these changes?

Hosack: “We’re having a meeting with the staff to discuss and to find the real purpose to why we are here and it’s for you guys to walk across that stage. Not with just a diploma but be college ready, career ready and life ready and so its about making sure that we put all the structures in systems in place in your school in order to make it successful. While it may not be viewed like that, I want people to know that I could waste those 25 minutes of your life every single day (in advisory) or I can make it useful and the point is to make sure that every single minute that you are here at school is serving the purpose of why, getting you ready to be more successful when you graduate and we want every single freshman to walk through that door and to leave with a diploma their senior year plus some college credit and I think these structure is going to help us.”

“The (Flexible Instruction Time) program is the reason these changes came to be and because classes have to be a certain amount of time and so thats why school starts 5 minutes earlier and ends five minutes later, and by having these changes now it will help Akins be on board with student sharing next year without huge amounts of changes once again.”

EE: How do you think students will react to these changes?

Hosack: “Change is hard. I want students to know that I’m not doing this just because I want you to have a longer school day but it’s about what small changes can we make to make a huge impact. What little changes can we do to have a huge benefit, while on paper it may not seem like a big deal, but I promise it’s going to have a huge impact on how rigorous your education is here at Akins and how prepared you feel when you leave.”

EE: What are you looking forward to accomplishing this year?

Hosack: “A list of things. I’m really excited about our (Social Emotional Learning) program for our freshmen, to see what that bring to our freshmen class. Our freshman just don’t have the maturity to be successful in high school. They don’t have the study skills, their social footing yet and I’m hoping this SEL program really helps bring some strategies and some mechanism to be able to be in high school. To start their freshman year successfully — because unfortunately too many of our freshmen stumble — and I hope this course relieves that. I’m very excited with the work being done in the College and Career Center. Ms. Simmons is going to have not 1 but 2 people helping in there making sure all are our students are being helped.  Now with the admin team, counselors, teachers we’re making sure our students are college ready and career ready and so what does that really mean? So we are going to be re-aligning ourselves in some ways so I’m excited to see our work come out of there. Just in general we’ve got new teachers on campus that are going to be amazing addition to our already successful staff.”

EE: What changes are in store for Akins High School during this school year?

Hosack: “Back last year there was there was a lot of conversation about the Student Sharing model and what that was, was a program the district wanted to have to where students from another school for example Bowie, Travis or any of the south school could come to Akins and take part in our career tracks and still be a student at that school, it would also allow an Akins student to go to one of those school to participate in their career track. Akins has more CTE programming and we have more majors  — if you will — than any other school in the district so as the numbers shook out we just didn’t have any kids that wanted to leave Akins, which I think is awesome. I want to keep all my kids but the north schools had a lot of kids that wanted to go between school to school. We didn’t find out pretty much until the middle of summer, but Student Sharing has been put on hold for the south schools, so they will try it out in the north and probably bring it on board next year for the south schools. That’s where it all started and we were having to make arrangements because like I said we didn’t know we were going to be participating until the middle of the summer and having to make arrangements like we were. For Student Sharing there had to be time where the students from other campuses would have to be here First or Fifth Period and they would have to have travel time back to their school. Every single day there was going to be a set amount of time what we know as advisory time to get back to their school. That’s where we said we were going to have to have advisory time five days a week. Now the way that advisory has worked on this campus is not exactly in my opinion has not used our time as wisely as we could have so taking it from two days to five days it going to be like we can’t miss time. We have to make it worthwhile so that’s where the (FIT) idea came from. Its an acronym for Flexible Instructional Time and I borrowed the idea from (Bowie Principal Stephen) Cane, Anderson High school and a few other schools that are around not just the district but around the area. What FIT is, imagine those afternoons where you say “Oh I have to stay after school to do this or that to make up this test.” Imagine that after school time tutoring fit into your school day. Monday would basically be regular advisory day for things such as checking your grades and tuesday through thursday will be tutoring day or make up work days and friday will be enrichment day, in which students will be taught a life skill.”