ARCHIVED  August 25, 2000

School-to-Career prepares students

Initiative goes beyond career education

Erin Erickson wishes she had taken more computer classes as she worked her way through school.

Now a senior at Fort Collins High School, Erickson said more computer experience would have helped in her job at Demrow Koenig & Associates. She started working at the Fort Collins securities and financial firm at the end of her sophomore year through the FCHS Professional and Community Experience, or PaCE, program. Since then, she has gained more responsibility at the company and learned skills that will help her regardless of the career she enters as an adult.

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Other students in Northern Colorado school districts should get an earlier indication of what skills they will want and need, as well as lessons in those skills, thanks to School-to-Career initiatives. And students such as Erickson will be able to put those skills to use in real-work experiences.

School-to-Career, a phrase coined in the mid-1990s, is not career or vocational education where students are trained to enter certain fields upon graduation. Rather, it is a K-12 approach to giving students “workplace competencies.”

“Career education is very specific. It focuses on a set of skills at the high-school level,´ said Marsha Ring, Poudre School District School-to-Career coordinator.

School-to-Career is for students at all grade levels, focusing not on a specific set of skills for one industry or another, but on those abilities that young people must have to enter any career field, she said. Those skills, sometimes described as “soft skills,” are the qualities employers seek … communication and problem-solving abilities, “emotional intelligence,” teamwork, etc.

“When people have those skills, they’re going to succeed much quicker,” Ring said.

Nancy Wear, Thompson School District director of secondary curriculum, said School-to-Career should not be viewed as a curriculum, but as “an instructional practice focused on bringing, into any curriculum, relevancy and application. The reason we do that is so classrooms become facilitated on learning, rather than the ‘sit-and-get’ method we all went through. … Kids are teaching themselves and learning as opposed to somebody trying to stand at the front of the room and stick it down their throats.”

That kid-driven approach relies on partnerships with businesses. PSD, TSD and the Greeley 6 School District all call upon business people to strengthen their School-to-Career initiatives. Business people stand to benefit from their involvement, said Jim Davis, chairman of the Greeley/Weld Chamber of Commerce Advocates for Workforce Excellence Committee and president of FirstBank of Greeley.

“Business people want to say, ‘This is what we need,'” Davis said. “That became much more important because of low unemployment. Businesses can’t find people, and you get more and more desperate to find someone to help you out….School-to-Career is a very important piece. It ties people in together — schools find out more about what businesses really need.”

Low unemployment and a labor shortage have made Northern Colorado an employees’ market — making it easier to find jobs, change jobs and command higher salaries and better benefits, said Lew Wymisner, assistant director of the Larimer County Workforce Center.

But just because the deck is stacked in favor of job seekers doesn’t mean that they can be light on skills. Partnerships — in the form of curriculum advice, externships for teachers and internships, job experience and mentorships for students — help schools arm their students to take advantage of the employment market, Ring said. Programs such as PaCE and career- and technical-education opportunities fall under the School-to-Career umbrella, though, and can be first steps toward a career or higher education, she said.

John Betello, vocational and School-to-Career coordinator for the Greeley school district, said teaching teachers is a key to successfully preparing students for the world of work. Greeley has a mini-grant program that gives funds to teachers looking to integrate workplace competencies into classroom lessons, he said. PSD and TSD have similar programs that allow teachers to spend time at an area business and observe all the jobs and job qualifications therein.

That provides relevancy to classroom lessons, said Connie Long, director of the Aims Community College-based School-to-Career Resource Center for Colorado’s Region 1, which encompasses 12 northeastern counties. “It’s real-life learning that they’ll use forever.”

That real-life learning does not come in separate classroom lessons, but rather as parts of lessons taught in core-curriculum classes. Integrating workplace competencies into math, science, language arts and social studies brings the relevancy of which Long spoke. No more will students have to ask, ‘Why do I need to know this?’ because the real-life application is part of the lesson, Wear said.

School-to-Career is meant to address students of all ages, but that doesn’t mean that second- or third-graders are being asked to make career choices. In elementary school, School-to-Career focuses on awareness, Ring said. For example, an elementary-school science lesson on trees may include information about forestry, logging and other related careers. By junior high, the focus is on exploration, allowing students to discover their interests and corresponding careers. By high school, the focus is on experience in the work world.

School-to-Career curriculum standards were not among the standards and benchmarks mandated by the state in 1993.

“It’s more voluntary,” Long said. “Schools are finding that employers are saying, ‘We don’t have a well-prepared work force.’ So they put some components of workplace competencies into the curriculum. … It hasn’t been mandated, but we all know if we aren’t teaching people to be good communicators, they’re not going to be successful.”

PSD, TSD and Greeley have been on the forefront of implementing School-to-Career components, Long said.

“They are probably forerunners with that integration component,” she said.

School-to-Career efforts were initially funded by the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994. Congress passed the act to provide “venture capital to states and local communities so they could develop partnerships … to work on linking what was learned in the classroom to what was really needed in the world of work,´ said Ruth Martinez, a spokesperson for the national School-to-Work Learning and Information Center.

Thus far, all 50 states have received some sort of funding from the $1.8 billion act.

“There was no particular template set in place in terms of, ‘this is how you do it,'” Martinez said. “Every state has gone about it in a different way. We’ve found a lot of success. We’re getting some really good information about the success of this initiative. … It’s giving (students) options, involving them in the world of work, doing internships and mentoring to find out what’s going on out there. It makes one of two things clear for students — that they’re interested in a field or it’s showed them that’s not really want they want.”

The funding allocated in the School-to-Work Opportunities Act sunsets in September 2001, but Martinez said most programs should be self-sustaining by then.

“The hope is that the partnerships built at the local level will continue,” she said.

Initiative goes beyond career education

Erin Erickson wishes she had taken more computer classes as she worked her way through school.

Now a senior at Fort Collins High School, Erickson said more computer experience would have helped in her job at Demrow Koenig & Associates. She started working at the Fort Collins securities and financial firm at the end of her sophomore year through the FCHS Professional and Community Experience, or PaCE, program. Since then, she has gained more responsibility at the company and learned skills that will help her regardless of the career she enters as an adult.

Other students in Northern…

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