Brent Batten: BSHS serves a new generation of students, and that's no bull

Boy, has high school changed.

And high schoolers too, apparently.

Bonita Springs High School, newly opened to freshmen and sophomores this year, looks a lot different from the high school I attended some 20 years ago. (Hey, when you consider all the billions of years this Earth has been here, approximating a date to within a few decades of the actual event is pretty close).

For starters, there are no books. Only laptop computers with everything students need to know at their fingertips. That’s fine, given that today’s teens seem uninterested in anything that doesn’t have a touch screen.

But where are the ornery kids going to draw racy pictures and write clever messages for next year’s class to discover when studying the handed-down text?

No books suggests no paper, taking away the mother of all missed homework excuses. What’s a kid supposed to say? The dog ate my laptop?

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No books also means no lockers. All the better to keep contraband off campus. But we’re losing valuable social skills fast enough as it is. Now students will have nowhere to hang out between classes, catching up on all the gossip fit to share in that three-minute break between bells.

No slamming locker doors, too, for the soundtrack of the high school years. No place to tape up pictures of that secret crush. No place to leave uneaten portions of lunches for weeks at a time until the smell serves as a reminder it’s time to clean.

BSHS (has a certain ring to it, does it not? As does the school mascot: Bull Shark!) has four academy classrooms complete with gear we never dreamed of back in the day.

For example, the medical academy room is equipped with human anatomy dummies and organ systems displays. Today’s teens must be a lot more focused and mature than my peers and I were.

Our biology teacher could barely get through the lesson on the reproductive system of flowers, what with all the snickering and rib-poking going on in the back row.

Introduce a full-size, anatomically correct model to the mix, and she would have had a riot on her hands. Glass windows allow passers-by to look into Bonita High’s medical academy. Anatomy becomes a spectator sport.

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There’s also a heating, ventilation and air conditioning academy where students can learn skills that can lead to a lifelong career.

According to the school website: “This academy prepares students for employment or advanced training in the heating, air conditioning and refrigeration industry. Students will work in a dedicated hands-on learning lab where they receive experience utilizing various types of residential HVAC equipment (air handlers, package units, compressors, etc.) Students will earn industry certifications in HVAC.”

There’s no mention of training the students to offer a $29.95 inspection and maintenance special, only to have that inspection find major problems with the unit that will require thousands of dollars to repair.

The STEM in the STEM academy stands for science, technology, engineering and math.

In the old days, we called it shop class. And the technology was a belt sander that allowed you to create a fog of sawdust much faster and with far less effort than you could with sandpaper and a block of scrap wood.

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Finally, there’s an aerospace academy formed in partnership with the Embrey-Riddle Gaetz Aerospace Institute.

Even though the school stresses students can get certification in “unarmed aircraft systems,” this academy would have been a big hit with my friends. We’d get in the classroom flight simulators and pretend we were Tom Cruise impressing Kelly McGillis in the hit fighter plane movie of the day, “Top Gun.” Or would it have been George Peppard impressing Ursula Andress in “The Blue Max?” Again, in the grand scheme of things, what’s a few decades, give or take?

Bonita Springs High School’s lockerless halls are bustling this week as book-free students move from classroom to academy and back, perhaps pausing a moment to study anatomy on the way. Maybe things haven’t changed that much, after all.

Connect with Brent Batten at brent.batten@naplesnews.com, on Twitter @NDN_BrentBatten and at facebook.com/ndnbrentbatten.

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