Ellis Middle School’s College Readiness course is about to make it big. School-wide big.

The College Readiness course, which is offered to sixth-graders every other day for a semester this year, will be a required course next fall.

“We’re going to offer a course that really has a place for (college readiness) to be embedded,” said Ellis Principal Katie Berglund. Berglund gave a presentation on changing course offerings to the Austin Public School board Monday evening.

Ellis is one of eight pilot schools for a University of Minnesota-designed education initiative called Ramp-Up to Readiness. The program was designed to get students prepared for some sort of post-secondary education.

Since Ellis participates in the initiative, created by the U of M’s College Readiness Consortium, it must report statistics and surveys gathered in the college readiness course throughout the school year. One survey has been taken and a second survey will be done later this spring.

Ellis is unique in that it’s the only school in the program, and therefore in the state, that offers a full-year college readiness class.

There will be a few other changes to the classes at Ellis next year. Since district officials are reviewing language arts curriculum this year, reading classes and oral and written communications classes will be refigured. These courses, on the lower end of language arts class offerings in seventh and eighth grade, will be combined with regular language arts classes and focus on reading and writing.

Sixth-graders won’t be offered Spanish next year, although the change isn’t as drastic as you’d think. This year, Spanish was offered every other day for one semester, which world language teachers didn’t feel was enough to effectively teach students. Next year, a first-year Spanish course will be offered in eighth grade, with a seventh-grade class exploring world languages, specifically Spanish and French, and a sixth-grade health class.

Students will now take a computer literacy class as a required elective, which will take the place of video production courses. Computer literacy will include video production lessons, which Berglund said will reach out to many more students than would normally be able to take video production.