News & Views

Starting in 2003, Envision Schools opened Marin School of Arts and Technology (MSAT) in the Novato Unified School District, a charter school; they wanted to be surrounded by technology, reflecting the new computer age. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they received over $1 million to start their first school, purchasing a class size of eMacs, Powerbooks, Digital Cameras and Video cameras.

After their first year of MSAT, Envision went to San Francisco to open their second school in 2004, City Arts & Technology (CAT).

At that time I was in 8th grade, applying for high schools throughout San Francisco, both private and public. A classmate applied and was accepted to CAT, and was telling me about it and that it will be highly technological and was funded by Bill Gates. He also had mentioned that they will be using Macs instead of PCs, which excited me because I was not a PC user; we used Macs at my school, St. Stephen's, and I have an iMac at home.

Once I heard about it, I told my mom about it and she got an application and sent it in for me. A few weeks later I received news that I was wait-listed for CAT, yet I was high on the waiting list at number thirteen.

I was not expecting to be accepted by CAT, so I was making plans to go to Mercy High School, which I was not too pleased about since I would have to be wearing uniforms and it was an all girls Catholic school.

Over the summer my mom would occasionally check in with CAT to see if I had moved up or down on the waiting list, and toward the end of the summer, we received a note that I had dropped to number sixteen on the wait list and my hopes of attending that school were diminished.
The beginning of the school year came and Catholic schools start one week before public or charter schools did, so I began attending Mercy. Mercy had slowly grown on me after a week but I still was not enthusiastic about the school, and after a week a CAT official called my home.

He said I was accepted after only one day of being opened, so the next day I went to see if I wanted to go to the school. We pulled up in the front of the school building, which was next door to a church, and had been a bankrupt Catholic Elementary school. I walked in and noticed how small it was in comparison to all the other high schools I had seen, but it was only in its first year and had only one class, the freshman class, consisting of 110 students.

I went to the first class of my day, the Language Arts class, and going to the classroom, I remember noticing the Digital Media class and how awesome it looked. I took special note of the brand new computers as I walked by.

After my first day there I agreed to attend CAT, making new friends and beginning to enjoy my classes and teachers.

Now, almost one school year has passed and it is the beginning of the fourth quarter at City Arts & Technology High School. Over the course of this eventful year, we have had press conferences with Cantonese News, appeared on KRON 4 news, had appeared in articles in The Examiner and The San Francisco Chronicle, had Mayor Gavin Newsom visit the school, and had been one of the few schools in the state to receive a $14 million grant from the government to go towards anything at our school. The school plans to use the grant toward building a new school building for CAT. All this press has been brought to us for one main thing, the technology. CAT is the most highly technological school in San Francisco.

During the course of this year in our Digital Media class we have done work with Adobe Photoshop 2.0. It was used in the beginning of the year for introduction to the Adobe Suite, which we used to make Andy Warhol imitations, and fake images. We used Adobe Illustrator CS in the middle of the year as well as Adobe Photoshop CS, an advanced form of what we were doing in Adobe Photoshop 2.0. We used Photoshop CS to make flyers for school activities, covers for essays in other classes, and to create a mathematical game board as a project for math class. Our yearbook committee is using InDesign CS. During our third quarter we also developed personal Websites using Adobe GoLive CS, which we had just finished. We are now learning about our video cameras and are going to make a movie for our fourth quarter project.

CAT is going into its second year for the 2005-06 year and MSAT is going into its third year. Both will eventually become full four- year high schools, and I will be proud to be in CAT's first graduating class.

Envision schools are opening a new school in San Francisco next year, called Metropolitan Arts & Technology High School (Metro), and may open another in Oakland for the 2006 school year.

Links:

City Arts & Technology:

http://cats1.es-cat.org/

Envision Schools:

http://www.envisionschools.org/index.php

Copyright (c) 2005 Elizabeth Dyer. This article originally appeared in the North Coast Mac Users Group newsletter, May 2005.

This article may be used by any Mac MUG provided credit is given to the North Coast Mac Users Group and to the writer.