Piedmont Governor’s School
There comes a time when many sophomores are offered the opportunity to spend their final two years of high school away from THS. Among these options, there is Gov School. Piedmont Governor’s School for Math, Science and Technology is a regional grant of academically rigorous courses by the surrounding counties and community colleges.
In Pittsylvania County and the adjacent city of Danville, Governor’s School classes are held at the Institute of Advanced Learning and Research, or IALR. This means that students attend classes with other students from Galileo, Chatham, Dan River, Gretna, and George Washington High School.
Governor’s School does require an entrance test as well as prerequisite courses such as trigonometry. Once admitted into the program, each day, students go to IALR, and have classes from 7:45-11:00 am. Each semester, students take four classes as well as the classes they attend at their base school; these classes operate on an A-day B-day schedule. For example, you could have physics and statistics on one day and research and English on the other.
Instead of AP courses, Governor’s School students take advanced credit courses and are enrolled directly at DCC. This means students can get college credit without the need to take and pass AP tests with at least a 3. The only extra credits needed to graduate with an associates that students don’t take at Governor’s school are the credits granted by taking AP US history, three AP social science courses, and an approved wellness course that can be taken by signing up for summer courses at DCC.
Governor’s school aims to educate students in new and innovative ways. Each class is taken through DCC, and they grant students an opportunity to gain the majority of college credits needed to get an associate’s degree. These classes include biology, anatomy & physiology, chemistry, physics, statistical reasoning, Statistics I & II, precalculus, Calculus I, English 11, English 12, junior research, and senior research.
The courses taken at Governor’s school are designed to prepare students for college. For example, each year, students are required to take a class which emphasizes the importance of APA style writing and research as well as their regular MLA-based English courses. Along with this, to pass Governor’s School, students must pass an online college readiness course.
A big part of the Governor’s School experience is the required senior research project or SRP. This project allows students to invent their own experiment and complete research on their chosen topic. Within this study, students are allowed to use lab facilities and resources to complete their research. This project is a long process, and over the course of a year, students write a research paper depicting the process of their study.
Students should think about attending Governor’s school if they truly want to learn all that their education has to offer. Because of the packed schedule, Governor’s School is not for the faint of heart. It involves perseverance, time management, and thick skin to bear the truth of how unprepared you were before. Additionally, the very nature of Governor’s School breeds competition. So, if you enjoy long nights of studying, very honest feedback on your assignments, and worrying over whether or not you got a good enough grade to keep your GPA from falling, you just might love Governor’s School.