Lehighton and Weatherly are the only remaining Carbon County school districts to offer its students the ability to attend Carbon Career and Technical Institute on a part-time basis.

That may eventually change, however, after discussion by Lehighton Area School District's finance committee last week."I think we're cheating the part-time students," said board member William Hill Jr."I've been up (to CCTI) and I've seen it. By the time the part-time students get up there and get off the bus, they are losing quality educational time and they can't catch up to the full-time students."A career and technical school located in Jim Thorpe, CCTI serves high school students from the five Carbon County school districts.Jim Thorpe, Palmerton and Panther Valley have all opted for a full-time only offering for students. Lehighton offers a full and part-time option."Districts choose full-time only for different reasons," said Jonathan Cleaver, Lehighton Area School District superintendent. "Palmerton, for example, did it because of the distance for them to go up there."Lehighton has 38 students attending CCTI part-time, split between the morning and afternoon, and 67 at the school on a full-time basis."The reason we decided to offer part-time two or three years ago was to encourage more students to participate in the CCTI program," said Andrew Yenser, a Lehighton board member who also sits on CCTI's joint operating committee. "It was also to give students who were in 11th or 12th grade at the time an option to get a few years of technical education. It wasn't to promote the part-time option at all."Lehighton is responsible for the academic scores of its part-time students, who take four core subjects in the district including math, English, social studies and science."Their test scores have really been good here," said Lehighton Board President Gloria Bowman.Part-time students, according to Lehighton board member Hal Resh, lose around 25 minutes of instructional time each day riding the bus back and forth to CCTI.Cleaver recommended polling the current part-time Lehighton students at CCTI to see if they would still attend the trade school if only a full-time option was offered."My concern is that the majority may then say well I'm not going up there at all," Cleaver said.Hill also lamented the fact that the home school districts pay 100 percent of the transportation cost to get students back and forth to CCTI."We're always talking about shared cost and the door isn't swinging both ways here," he said. "I'm a big fan of reciprocity. Can we force a technical school that serves all of Carbon County to share in that cost?"According to state law, if a district provides transportation for students attending its own schools, then it must provide transportation for students attending schools such as CCTI. The law is contingent upon the school being within 10 miles of the district's boundary, measured by the nearest public road.Cleaver said Lehighton pays for three runs a day to CCTI including before school, midday and after school."We're still working on a total transportation cost from last year," he said.