Starting next year, Akins freshmen will be able to travel to other nearby high schools to take Career and Technology Education classes that are not offered at their home campus.

This new program called Student Sharing is a means for the school district to provide all CTE classes to all students without duplicating programs that require specialized equipment and instructors.

This program has already started at North Austin campuses and will be expanding to all of the other high schools in Austin south of the Colorado River next year.

“Here at Akins we have more CTE pathways than any other school in the district, which is awesome, but we’re still missing a couple,” Principal Brandi Hosack said.

“For example, we don’t have culinary arts, we don’t have cosmetology, and we don’t have automotive, but we have pretty much everything else,” Hosack said.

Akins will also be opening up some of the programs that are only offered here to students at the other South Austin high schools, including Animation/Video Game Design, an engineering program, and computer science.

To make the schedule work, all of the Austin high schools will have to be on the same A-B Day schedule and the same bell schedule. The new bell schedule is expected to be from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Some Akins students said they are excited to see the opportunities, but the program is mostly geared toward incoming freshmen and some sophomores who will be required to complete a 4 or 3 year sequence of CTE classes to graduate.

If you decide to participate in student sharing you would most likely have to get to school a little earlier, Hosack said.  

“So let’s say you have to be here at 8:30, maybe the shuttle leaves at 8:35 a.m. to get you to Bowie in time for a 9 a.m. class, and then that class ends over there somewhere around 10:30, and then you travel back, but remember at 10:30 we go into FIT here, so you would make it back with plenty of time for your 2nd period class. You would be missing FIT, but at least your not missing a class,” Hosack said.