Academics
High Technology offers a full high school education, with emphasis on math, science, and technology. Students take college courses during their junior and senior years, and seniors are required to take a mentorship course for one semester.
Class scheduling works around "block" scheduling. All classes are 69 minutes long, and there are 5 periods in a day. All students eat lunch at the same time, between 11:15 and 12:00 PM. Most classes are held three times a week. Physical Education is held two periods per week. Some science classes have "double labs" which are two periods (140 minutes) long, while calculus classes meet one extra period per week. Foreign languages taught at High Technology High School include Spanish, French and Latin. Junior and senior technology electives - Project Lead the Way (Digital Electronics, Civil Engineering and Architecture, and Engineering Design and Development), and Brookdale Community College courses (C++ and Game Design) - are held twice a week for three periods (210 minutes).
Both the faculty and the student body have found this schedule to be to their advantage. For students it means more time to get things done in class and more time to do homework. For the teachers it means longer uninterrupted blocks of time to instruct students.
Students of HTHS have an opportunity to participate in a mentoring program. The program is in lieu of participating in the college courses for one semester. Students work side by side with an engineer, scientist, or researcher, doing real-time research in a technological field two mornings each week. At the conclusion of the mentorship, each student delivers a multimedia presentation in a colloquium of peers and mentors. This summarizes all the formal and informal learning at the conclusion of the senior year.
All students are required to take Brookdale Community College courses as part of their academic preparation at HTHS. Additionally, students may elect to take courses on their own after school hours for exploration, transfer, or application to further collegiate studies.
Many of the courses offered at HTHS are taught by teams of teachers with expertise in their respective fields. The sci-tech program, humanities program, and the sophomore technologies program integrate multiple disciplines to enhance subject matter for students. Students work in teams which are assessed by exhibition as well as traditional methods.
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