Watkins Mill Adds to its Academic Arsenal

When school starts again on Monday, Watkins Mill High School will be launching the latest addition to its academic offerings: A program that fuses its International Baccalaureate coursework with the school’s career-focused academies.

The IB “Career-related Certificate” program at Watkins Mill is among the first of 20 at schools nationwide. Rockville High School is the only other in MCPS.

Watkins Mill has had IB’s “Diploma Programme” since 2005. The school also runs five “career academies”: finance, engineering, medical careers, hospitality and child development. Until now, students have had to choose—either go after the full IB diploma or join one of the academies.

“Typically it used to be one or the other. This partners them. It’s bringing that global IB perspective to the career academies,” said Scott Murphy, Watkins Mill's principal.

Forty-two Watkins Mill juniors have signed up. Those students will take two Diploma courses and a full courseload from one of the academies, as well as complete a set of specially tailored IBCC courses, community service, become proficient in a second language, then cap it off with a "reflective" research project.

The program comes as the latest step in Murphy’s push to raise the academic bar at the 1,600-student school, which covers most of Montgomery Village and parts of Gaithersburg and Germantown.

Earlier this year, Watkins Mill parents and administrators to bring the IB precursor for middle schoolers into the Watkins Mill cluster. That “Middle Years Programme” will start at Montgomery Village Middle School in the 2014 school year.

“We’re really excited about what this all means to help us evolve as a school,” Murphy said.