The School District of Osceola County held a district wide Career and Technical Education (CTE) Advisory Council meeting last week, bringing together all the district’s professional tech-ed teachers for a day of professional development and, more importantly, meetings with 40 to 50 of their business and industry partners.
“Today we’re bringing in industry leaders and business owners to meet with the teachers and collaborate,” said, Stephen Darago, the district’s CTE Coordinator. “What we’re trying to do is figure out, from the industry -what do they need? How do we train our kids to make sure they can be better suited in their industry? This is a huge collaboration of these business partners working with the teachers and then learning how we can better serve our students to pipeline them into these opportunities.”
Osceola schools have 45 different programs in 40 schools, including everything from HVAC, automotive, health care, visual design, and hospitality programs. For CTE programs like these the state requires a community local needs assessment be performed. This day of meetings showed how the local district is collaborating with industry.
“We have all these businesspeople here from Disney, from local business owners, and they’re here to work with our teachers, to collaborate—so we can see what they need so we can train our kids to go into industry and be successful,” said Darago. “They’re going to look at the questions we’ve asked and give us their feedback, and then we’re going to take that feedback to work with the teachers and the district to make sure we’re providing everything that is necessary— curriculum, training equipment, any sort of skill we can provide for our teachers and our students. We’re going to listen to them because they are the industry experts. We’re training kids- it’s a huge collaboration is what it is. So many connections are made today. It’s a wonderful thing.”
With industry input, the district can offer industry certifications in their programs. A student who goes through a program has a chance to get a certification that’s aligned with the industry. For example, in automotive there is the ASE certification— Automotive Service Excellence- that’s the industry standard. Students can get ASE certified in high school so that when they graduate, they can go work with these companies and they’re already certified.
“The big thing that we’re trying to do is to bridge the gap and show what we’re doing at this high school level is validated into the work force,” said Derek Petrangeli, a District Resource Teacher (DRT). “Kids can leave high school with a certification and jump right into the workforce and be properly prepared for apprenticeships, making that connection with these business partners and having these kids be able to see what they’re able to do is something that I think is very viable because nowadays college is putting a lot of kids into debt.”
“What CTE programs allow us to do is let kids explore careers before they even go into college, It’s really good to get them the hands-on experience, because if it’s something they don’t like, they don’t have to spend four years at a college. Instead, they can spend maybe one year as a freshman (in high school) and say, “you know what? That wasn’t for me but I see that you’ve got a business finance class that I want to try’. They can go and do that and if they like it then they can go through whatever the level of the curriculum is. It gives them the chance to earn an adult certification before they leave high school.”
