Student feedback ‘very, very positive’ for SMHS Forensic Science

A course offered at San Marcos High School turns classrooms into crime labs and students into detectives.

While SMHS students are required to take the standard Biology, Chemistry, and Physics courses their first three years of high school, CTE Program Coordinator Clayton Odam said a  couple of options are available for their senior year, including forensic science.

“[Forensic science has] become very popular,” Odam said.

There are 88 students enrolled in the Forensic Science course at SMHS. The course is taught by Alexa Bryant, a first-year teacher at the high school with a background in Forensic and Biological Anthropology.

Bryant described her curriculum as very “hands-on” with few lectures.

“Right now, we’re learning about searching and documenting crime scenes,” Bryand told the Daily Record. “So I had students make their own crime scenes with fake evidence and things like that, and then they measured everything and made a final sketch that was actually to scale.

“Then we moved on to evidence collection, [where] we had them collect evidence from a fake crime scene and we did the chain of custody, so they had to maintain the integrity and chain of custody as they transmitted evidence from person to person,” Bryant said.

She added that her students are looking forward to the Anthropology unit, in which students will learn to analyze skeletal remains for information about their sex, ancestry, and height.

“You can actually also look at occupational markers to kind of figure out what they did and what their lives looked like, but that's a little bit further and more detailed than the scope of this class,” Bryant said.

“She is doing a great job,” Odam said. “[Bryant] is so excited. She’s been doing some wonderful stuff,” said Odam. “The feedback has been very, very positive.”

According to Odam, Forensic Science not only qualifies as a science course at SMHS, but as an upper-division course in a CTE program that prepares students for careers in law enforcement.

Law Enforcement is one of 22 TEA-recognized Programs of Study SMHS offers, according to their website. The overall program has been at the school for over 17 years, with 261 students enrolled in the program this year.

Odam says the Law Enforcement Program is designed to “help kids explore the variety of options available in law enforcement.”

“The students take it from start to finish,” said Odam. “In the beginning, it's collecting evidence from the crime scene, maybe learning how to do fingerprint samples [or] lab work.

“They’ll take that on up until trying to figure out what happened in the crime scene, putting together the briefs to take to a district attorney to say, ‘Okay, now here's who we think did it.’ Basically, start to finish of a crime being committed, so that way they’re exposed to and develop the skills necessary for all of those.”

Odam said all of the CTE classes SMHS offers carry college preparatory components to them.

“We just feel very strongly that our CTE courses are designed to be college and career ready,” he said.

CTE is not only useful for students pursuing the trades, according to Odam. It also helps them build skills they will carry into the workplace and beyond.

“We have lots of our kids that are going into college, either to do the thing they were doing in the CTE program or to do something else,” he said. “But learning about group communication, learning critical thinking skills, learning some of these things that they learned in their CTE classes [is] preparing and helping them for college, regardless of what they choose to go into.”

To learn more about CTE offerings at SMHS, visit www.smcisd.net/Domain/192.