Coming into Akins, I was never told about student sharing. I didn’t even know what student sharing meant until a couple of days ago when I was given the recommendation to write this article. That got me thinking, why was I never informed about it?

Student Sharing became a thing here at Akins on the 2016-2017 school year alongside other Austin ISD south high schools. The main purpose of student sharing is to give students the opportunity to take classes from other schools that are not available at their high school. But not every student will be accepted into the classes.

“Most of the time they fill to capacity based on home campus students not leaving space for sharing with other campuses.” said Dr. Thyrun Hurst, the Director for High School Operations in Austin ISD.

Above is a list of all the available courses that are part of the Student Sharing Program. Though there are a lot of options from different schools, some courses are missing. When asked about this situation, Traci Hendrix (The CTE Curriculum Coordinator) had this to say.

“Each campus individually determines which programs will be offered for student sharing. Some of the reasons a campus may not offer a program include overpopulated programs with facility and schedule constraints, a new program that is not fully implemented yet, or a pending program change.”

Although student sharing is an amazing idea for students that don’t want to move schools for certain courses, there is still some challenges that come with this program. Here are some of the challenges that counselors have came across so far.

“The biggest challenge about the program is transportation,” said Ms. Margarita Moreno, the Green Tech Counselor here at Akins.

“If a student arrives late to school, they miss the student share bus to Travis or Crockett. They sit in an office for an entire period and are in danger of not completing the required hours for certain classes.”