Career readiness increasingly a focus of local schools

BELOIT — It’s not that Zach Potter was a bad student when he started at Beloit Turner High School in 2021-2022, he was just indifferent.

“I really didn’t want to be here, but then I started taking shop classes and I’ve loved it ever since,” Potter said.

Potter now is in the Youth Apprenticeship Program, which is a work-based learning program that combines classroom instruction with on-the-job training. The program is available to high school juniors and seniors.

Potter comes to school and gets to leave early to go to work at Country Glass Inc. The company currently is working at the Next Steps Family Resilience Center after having spent much of the past few months working at the new ABC Supply Learning Center.

“We were working on (the ABC Supply project) pretty much from the start,” Potter said. “It was interesting seeing how a building comes together.”

Today is the last day of Career and Technical Education Month, a public awareness campaign launched by the Association for Career and Technical Education and sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders.

Education has become increasingly political over the past few years, but one trend that seems to have supporters on all sides is a greater focus on career readiness. According to the most recent data available, which was taken from the 2021-2022 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), 85% of high school graduates in 2019 took at least one CTE course.

According to Dana Leikness, who is the YA coordinator and job developer for the Southwest Wisconsin Workforce Development Board, the program had 52 kids in apprenticeships in 2019-2020. In 2022-2023, it took its first appreciable jump since COVID to 152 students. This year, there are 231 students gaining experience in YA from nine different high schools, including Beloit Memorial, Turner, Parkview and Rock County Christian.

This year’s students are working in 14 different career clusters, ranging from health science and architecture/construction (44 students each) all the way down to one student in a business administration apprenticeship.

Students in the Stateline Area are lucky that the region has a strong manufacturing background, and local high schools are increasingly investing in CTE education.

* The Lincoln Academy has two technical education teachers and one computer science teacher offering classes from construction to welding to gaming concepts and innovation. The school partners with Blackhawk Technical College to offer courses in healthcare. The school, which has a senior class for the first time, has 60 juniors and seniors participating in work-based learning, up from 37 a year ago.
* Turner has its second cohort of students in Craftsman with Character. Developed in Edgerton, it’s a 16-week job shadowing course in partnership with local high schools and businesses to introduce students to career options in the trades. This year, 29% of Turner’s seniors are in a workplace learning experience — either Youth Apprenticeship or internship — up from 2% of seniors in 2021-2022.
* Beloit Memorial High School was actually the first local high school to join the Craftsman with Character program in 2022. The School District of Beloit has put considerable effort into CTE education. According to the most recent School Report Card from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, in the 2022-2023 school year, 341 students at Beloit Memorial High School — or 22.1% of the students at BMHS — participated in a work-based learning program. The state average was just 8.5%.
* In South Beloit, Superintendent Scott Fisher said that the 55 students who graduated in the spring earned 591 college and career credits while at the high school.
* Hononegah Community High School this past spring was named a 2023-2024 Distinguished High School by Project Lead The Way for its science, technology, engineering and math — also known as STEM — curriculum.

“I wouldn’t say we’re investing more (in career readiness),” said Chad Dougherty. “Career readiness has been a focus here for a long time and it’s stressed in every classroom. What you are seeing is that the longer it’s a focus the more opportunities are created.”

While students in the Stateline Area have been fortunate that local school leaders see the value of building work skills in high school, that’s not uniformly true in Wisconsin.

Jill Underly, who was elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2021, points out on the DPI website that Wisconsin is one of just six states that does not have some type of dedicated funding for the development of CTE programs in public schools.

Underly is seeking an additional $60 million in the 2025-2027 biennial budget request to expand career and technical education.

Matt Bright, Turner High School principal, said the growth of CTE is limited only by the amount of funding available.

“By the time I became a teacher in 2011, we were past the era of everyone needs to go college,” Bright said. “The growth in these classes has been tremendous, and on the other side, businesses are demanding it. They are struggling to find people to fill positions. We are meeting a need.”