Education at Work

It looked like a

great opportunity for employers trying to recruit workers.

Close to 1,000 people gathered to hear speakers from Southwest Florida's biggest industries discuss career opportunities. And then the audience of eighth-graders rose from their seats and filed out of Ida Baker High School's auditorium.

Eighth-graders considering their fu-ture career options?

"I find with my eighth-graders, just the ninth grade is their future. It's hard to look four years ahead," confesses Trafalgar Middle School teacher Kathy Franzblau, who accompanied some of the 2,000 Lee County eighth-graders attending the two-day program, hosted by Lee County's Horizon Council's Work Force Task Force.

But even eighth grade isn't soon enough to introduce students to career options, say a growing number of Florida educators and business leaders. The challenge for educators is to keep students engaged, decrease the high school drop-out rates and provide them with a solid basis for a career. For employers, it's to fill positions with well-trained personnel.

Students who go away to college don't necessarily return here to live and work, sometimes because they aren't familiar with opportunities here, says Lee's economic development director Regina Smith.

Perhaps more pertinent, not all students are inclined or able to pursue a four-year college degree, and they aren't well prepared to make the most of opportunities-in work or post-secondary education-that are open to them.

engaging students

Pat Riley, executive director of the regional Alliance of Educational Leaders, attributes state and national high school drop-out rates to two main factors: students who don't learn to read well leave school because they feel like failures, or learning "doesn't seem to mean anything to them."

"A lot of kids get disillusioned early on because everything is geared toward a college degree," says Horizon Council chairman Bruce Gora.

As Steve Shimp sees it, by pushing students toward colleges, educators and parents have discouraged students in the past few generations from pursuing careers in crafts and trade skills. They pursue a degree "because their folks wanted them to," says Shimp, chairman of the council's Education Task Force and president of construction company Owen-Ames-Kimball Co. "Everyone wants their kid to grow up and be a doctor or a lawyer-not a skilled carpenter," he points out.

He believes that attitude has to change, not only for students, but also to stem the shortage of skilled workers in the country.

"There are a lot of students who are not tuned into learning by books and chalkboards and computers, and in lieu of that are eager to learn by hands-on, sight, touch-crafting something, not necessarily in the mind but with their hands," says Shimp.

Trade unions filled the training gap until their missions shifted. As a result, the country has a marked shortage of skilled labor, he says. "In the construction industry, there's a huge demand not for unskilled, but for skilled positions," such as electricians, plumbers, bricklayers and cement finishers, he says.

"People are coming from other countries with those kinds of skills. Lord, if we didn't have them we wouldn't have anything built in this country," he adds.

Shimp says skilled trades workers have excellent opportunities. In construction, for instance, with five years' experience, "we're paying $18 to $26 an hour, and you're paid overtime, so $40,000 to $50,000 a year plus complete benefits," he says. "Tradesmen who went into supervisory positions are earning well north of $100,000 in total compensation."

Working curricula

Although critics object that teaching focuses too heavily on FCAT testing, efforts to decrease drop-out rates and improve students' chances at success are pushing a different approach.

"Over the last six to eight years, we have seen a significant shift to focus on career education; prior to that there were isolated efforts. There wasn't a strong connection between what students were learning in the classroom and how that might apply to their lives later on," says Riley.

"Kids learn best when you integrate the curriculum," she explains. "Reading isn't taught just by itself, math isn't taught just by itself. [Students] start working on a project that makes them utilize math and reading and science. They apply what they're learning, and that's where they really grasp it."

That concept has gotten an extra boost from Gov. Jeb Bush's A-Plus-Plus Plan for Education. High school students will be required to declare a major and take several courses in that discipline, and even middle schoolers will be exposed to more career- and vocation-oriented options. The Legislature passed the measure in May, and it's expected to be implemented in the 2007 school year.

A number of career-oriented programs already are reshaping public schools. In addition to the vocation-education schools that have continued to serve adults and nontraditional students, technical and career academies are in place in Lee and Collier, which allow students to focus on a particular field of study, with teachers from various disciplines integrating curricula geared toward that field. Comprehensive high schools also have opened in Lee, and Collier's first is opening this fall. Integral to the technical and career academies, they provide students with a conventional high school education and offer students the chance to get career training and even certifications to go directly into the workplace. In Charlotte County, elementary students already are getting exposure to various career options through career labs.

Collier also is launching a learning clinic in Immokalee for adults and high school juniors and seniors. "It will be a state-of-the-art storefront, where anyone can drive up, drop off a child at daycare, go to the cosmetologist and have their hair and nails done, go to a baking facility, and drop their car off [for repairs]," says B.J. Latanzi. "It's like a one-stop center. Students will be training and operating all levels of business."

In addition, dual enrollment and articulation agreements allow high school students to take courses at Edison College for credit. "A student can earn a whole semester of credit while in high school," says Jack Pause, coordinator of the Southwest Florida Tech Prep Consortium. "It doesn't cost them while they're in high school, and it gives them some skills if they have to get a part-time job-and almost all of them do."

Articulation agreements are formed within each school district, but efforts are under way to create statewide articulation, says Pause.

Lifelong learning

"Workforce and business are really leading this," says Latanzi of career-education initiatives. A career education task force of business and school representatives, parents and students hammered out some of the issues for two and a half years in Collier and came up with several recommendations, she adds. Among them were career counseling from kindergarten through 12th grade, marketing to students, parents and the public to explain the various options and opportunities, and providing honors-level career and technical courses-such as health sciences, engineering and accounting; honors students won't take courses that don't offer honors credit, she explains.

Continued participation by the business community is critical to meeting workforce needs and keeping curricula relevant, she adds. To that end, a comprehensive career and education advisory board is being formed in Collier to engage the major industries and employers.

"When [students] leave high school, they should have a sense of what they're interested in," says Latanzi. Schools should be helping them assess those interests and aptitudes to help point them in the right direction. They might not stick to a specific track, but if they identify an area of interest, schools can expose them to options and how to achieve them-whether in automotive repair or the arts.

"When students truly love the arts, they should be directed to the arts. But what interests them? Do they want to understand different media, or do they want to become a curator-and what will it take to get there?"

The trick is to make the education system fluid from kindergarten through advanced higher education-"a K-20 system"-with post high school programs designed "so they can plug in and out of it," says Pause. "Nobody wants them to stop [their education]; we want them to go as far as they can go."

"We have to start thinking of school as a continuing process," says Riley. "We've got to become, all of us, lifelong learners, or we'll never be able to keep up."

Education Adds to Earnings

A four-year college degree does affect a person's earning potential-to the tune of about $1 million over a lifetime, says Jacqueline King, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C. And those who don't go directly from high school to college "don't tend to do as well in terms of grades and persistence."

According to 2003 U.S. Census figures, of all working people in the United States, those with only a high school degree or GED made about $23,673 a year compared with $40,588 earned by those with a four-year degree, says King. Among those with full-time, year-round jobs, high school degrees netted an annual income of $29,635, compared to bachelor's degrees, which upped earnings to $47,552.

It doesn't take a baccalaureate degree to make an excellent living, but it does typically take more than a high school degree. Even students who hadn't planned to attend college often discover the jobs they want require some college education, says King. "You can work in a department store without a degree, but you will need some post-secondary education to move up," she explains.