When students walk outside the Master's Academy's black steel gates for the last time as seniors, they may be taking one giant leap ahead of their competition. It all started years earlier, as students as young as juniors were taking college courses, vaulting them a year or more ahead of college-bound students. And they do it all inside their high school.

 

"If you were a parent and you wouldn't have to pay a penny more to have your kid walk out of high school with 36 to 40 credit hours on a college transcript, wouldn't you do it?" asked Laura Deery,

 

The Master's Academy's director of development and admissions.

 

It's all part of a push by the school to buck the national trend of class cutting and teacher layoffs that's plaguing Seminole County Public Schools. Up to 1,200 positions will be slashed from the school district's budget before the start of the next school year, in response to a cut of up to $64 million. But The Master's Academy, a private institution, is going the other way. 

 

"We have the same re-enrollment that we had as last year," Deery said. "We're trying to figure out, how can we get them even more for their money."

 

The program was the brainchild of Superintendent Bill Harris, who was looking for a way to put his students ahead of other graduating classes. 

 

"Many schools have dual-enrollment classes where students can take college-level courses, but they have to do it at the college, so they have to travel to get there," Harris said. "And they have a lot of advanced-placement classes, where at the end you have to take the test to get credit. If you don't do well on the test, you don't get credit for the class. Here even if you don't do well on the AP test you can still get college credit for the class." 

 

The trick was getting classes to happen on a high school campus that would be accepted nationwide as college courses. That required turning more than a handful of The Master's Academy's teachers into college professors. 

 

Just down the road in Maitland, Belhaven College said yes, hiring those teachers and turning them into college professors, who work at the K-12 school. 

 

The tuition isn't any higher for students at The Master's Academy, but the college credit is real and transfers students into college with enough credit that they can start as sophomores straight out of high school. 

 

"It's costing the school money to the university," Harris said. "We have to pay them but we're not passing that charge on to the families."

 

The goal is a leap ahead in college, even as education is cut across the county. 

 

"In tough economic times we're trying to help our parents," Harris said. "Even after they're no longer a part of the master's academy, we're saving them money in college tuition."