(bright upbeat music) - Welcome to Forum 360.

I am Mark Welfley your host today.

Thank you for joining us for our Global Outlook with a Local View.

One undeniable outcome of the pandemic is that employers need more workers.

There are just not enough workers to satisfy employers growing needs.

Further, employees increasingly lack the soft skills demanded by employers like critical thinking, attention to detail, communication, leadership, and teamwork.

Yet hiding in plain sight within our communities is a possible resource to connect employers to the capable employees of today and tomorrow.

They are called Career Technical Education programs or CTE programs for short.

CTE programs are offered through a child's middle school or high school and are an extension of their education.

CTE programs formerly called vocational education programs used to be a last resort for students who weren't perceived as college material.

But this stereotype no longer applies.

Parents, higher education, and employers now look at CE programs in a whole new way.

CTE programs can translate into high skill, high wage, high demand internships, and other opportunities for students.

So how can employers tap into this rich resource pool of newly skilled and educated students?

Well, my guest today will tell us.

She is Mary Jane Stanchina, Executive Director of the Six District Educational Compact.

The Six District is comprised of six city school districts in Summit County.

Cuyahoga Falls, which happens to be alma mater, Tallmadge, Stow-Munroe Falls, Woodridge, Hudson, and Kent.

The Six District offers programs from aeronautics to robotics and from cosmetology to construction, nearly 30 programs in all.

Welcome, Mary Jane.

- Thank you, Mark.

- Nice to have you here.

- Great to be here.

I just need to clarify your geography.

- Okay.

- One district is in Portage County.

So I don't want to upset anybody in the Kent School District to think that they are now involved in Summit County.

- Thank you and I'm sorry.

(both laughs) The Six District Educational Compact.

Tell us how it got started.

- It's been in existence first of all for 52 years.

And it was started when the state legislature in the late '60s mandated vocational education to be a component and an offering for all students throughout the state.

And so their idea at first was every school district would be a part of a career center or a joint vocational school.

The superintendents who were then in that role in these six districts decided they weren't going to do that and that they would create a compact and that's what they did.

And it works because of the geography.

Each one of those school districts is no more than 15 minutes away from each other.

So to have a separate building with additional millage made no sense to them.

So they created the Six District Educational Compact 52 years ago.

It was the first one in Ohio.

And I like to refer to the fact that we're the best, but there are many other fine compacts in Ohio.

So we offer 28 different career and technical education programs.

And we offer other programs and services other than career and tech ed.

We do a reading and writing festival for seventh and eighth graders.

We have a program in conjunction with Summa Health System for eighth grade girls who are interested in mathematics and science.

And professional development for teachers, administrators.

So it's an avenue where we can provide services where there is a need within each of those six districts.

- What was the very first program when 52 years ago the Six District got started and how do you decide what new programs to add coming to the 28 programs that you offer now?

- Well, the first programs were those that had already lived within those six districts.

So there was cosmetology, marketing, auto technologies and there was machining.

And so those programs, the superintendents then agreed would stay in those buildings.

And so that's how those are some of the examples of things that existed then.

So to answer the question about, well, how do we create new programs?

We take a look at the workforce and economic data for Northeastern Ohio.

The second thing we do is to find out from students what they might be interested in.

And so every few years we do a survey of eighth grade students and sometimes ninth grade.

Third thing we do is to look at our facilities, to see who, meaning which school district, might have the facilities to host such a program.

And then we look at what might be the availability of teachers.

Now, in my stay at the compact, we've never had that availability of a teacher be an issue because many of our teachers have a multitude of certifications, which is most helpful as you start to create something like this.

Then when we decide and there's lots of district interaction and involvement in that decision from the principals to school counselors, to assistant superintendents, to superintendents who make the final decision.

And so then we create that program when we think we might wanna start it.

Who's going to house it?

And then we invite people from a business and industry to an agency's higher education to help us design that program.

So I call it the design team.

And that has been very effective in the last number of years that we've done that.

Of course, the caveat is that if you help us design it, we hope that you will stay with us and become a member of the advisory committee, or you provide us with assistance from your business or industry or university so that students have a number of offsite experiences.

- Mentioned at the outset the stigma that vocational education had in years past.

How did that dissipate, was it overnight?

What were the factors that went into the transformation into CTE programs that are recognized, acknowledged and really offer more students an opportunities to be involved?

- Well, it's my belief that that's a myth (both laughs) and far from being true.

- Good, I'm glad to hear that.

- Yet your statement is true.

There is a tremendous stigma about vocational programs to career and tech ed programs.

So a number of years ago, the superintendents agreed that with me that we should stop calling them vocational programs because it was too hard to overcome the image.

And so now we refer to them as career technical education programs.

And because our programs are aligned to business and industry standards and to specific technical content standards that come to us from the Ohio Department of Education, that concept of having these programs be for students who had no other outlets is just not true.

So we have embedded in every one of our 28 programs.

Everyone has embedded college prep academics.

And we're very proud of that.

We also embed what we call professional skills.

You referred to them as soft skills, we call them professional skills.

Additionally, all of our teachers work with their students on critical thinking, problem solving, working as a team, and presentation skills because that's all part of what business and industry is telling us they want students to have besides being there on time and being there every day.

(laughs) - Success stories, I'm a big fan of the success stories.

Can you share with me a couple of success stories-- - Mark, I am thrilled to share success stories with you.

- Awesome.

- First of all, in our engineering academy, which lives at Kent and Stow-Munroe Falls High Schools, we have Chloe, and Chloe was in the engineering academy for two years, and she informed us this summer, past summer that she had just graduated from Kent State in their college of architecture.

And she was headed to Princeton University.

And she was accepted into the master of architecture program there.

She is there now in her second semester, but the best part of all for Chloe was that she was one of five students that was admitted into the Advanced Placement program in their school of architecture.

Now, that is extraordinary.

Now we have Tessa.

Tessa was in our Collision Repair program that's housed through Woodridge.

And Tessa was in a program that is really rather non-traditional for females.

And she did well on the program.

And now she is an employee of an area collision repair shop, and she's a painter and she's doing very well and that's what her life's goal and life's work is all about, she says.

Then there's Austin.

Now, Austin is in his second year of our Entrepreneur Academy, which is a brand new program through Woodridge as well.

And it's very innovative and that uses a lot of mentors and business and industry people to work with the students.

So last year, the very first year of the program, he creates his own clothing line.

And I thought that was pretty spectacular.

However, he did that with the help of somebody from Calvin Klein in New York City, who is in the marketing world.

And that adult agreed to work with Austin because he, a number of years ago was in the marketing program at Cuyahoga Falls High School and had the same teacher as Austin has in this entrepreneur program.

So that's another example of how in the compact we collaborate and cooperate with each other.

Then there's Zack.

Now Zach is a completer of the Compact Project SEARCH program that lives at Summa Health System.

It's affiliated with the Cuyahoga Falls School District.

And Zach has been with us a long time at Summa, and he was just promoted to work as a trainer in their Vascular Department.

And so we're thrilled about Zach and Austin and Tessa and Chloe and all the other hundreds and hundreds of success stories we have with students and staff.

So you will see, I brought along newsletters.

And on our website you will find, your viewers will find newsletters.

They will find compact points, which is our compact three times a year newsletter.

So all of these marketing materials have just hundreds and hundreds throughout the years of these wonderful opportunities that our students and staff participate in.

That's fabulous for them.

And we have wonderful teachers, professional teachers who truly care about these students, and that's why all of these opportunities are available to them.

- Very interesting.

Love it.

If you're just joining us, welcome.

My guest today is Mary Jane Stanchina She is the Executive Director of the Six District Educational Compact.

And we are talking about the intersection of students and the learning in their college preparation, but also learning skills that can be meaningful in finding work upon completion of the program.

And so I wanna turn our attention here to the intersection between these students and employers.

- Okay.

- How can employers find you?

How can you help them seek out the right students for the right job.

Share that how that intersection can happen?

- Well, every one of our career and tech ed programs, Mark has an advisory committee.

And those advisory committee members help us making sure that we have the right alignment between what they need and what our technical content standards are that we're teaching.

That's one thing.

I would invite any potential employer who's watching this and who needs employees to think about how they could become involved in the Six District Educational Compact.

So if they're not involved, the first thing they could do is to call me.

And then I will make the connection for them between the appropriate high school administrator, where we have a program to the teacher.

And then I would invite that person to look at the labs, tour the facility, talk with the students, talk with the teacher, see what the content of the program is.

That would be the first step.

And so we would be most happy to have anybody who is needing employees, now, of course, you have to remember these sort of students have entry-level skills, but they have been through, as I said earlier, this whole arena of professional skills and the emphasis of being there daily, the emphasis of being on time, being responsible is very, very much a part of what we teach.

- Share with me the biggest challenge in running an individual career tech program, whether it's aeronautics or landscape design.

- Well, of course there are a lot of challenges that we face.

Certainly COVID was a prime example of that.

But I think one of the greatest challenges we have is time.

We have these programs for a three-hour block, either in the morning or in the afternoon.

And it's sometimes difficult to get students schedules worked out so that they can be in the CTE program as well as to pick up the other coursework that they need at their own school.

However, in the Compact, one of our greatest strengths has been collaborating with those six districts.

And honestly, the school counselors do a wonderful job of building schedules so that students can take some of those academic courses in the high school of where their CTE program is located, which is a great thing.

So without getting into the details and the morose of (both laughs) other things, I think time, I would say time is a factor.

- I'd like you to fast forward the clock 10 years and tell me where the Six District will be, where you want it to be.

Like, what's next out there for programs like the Six District and the dozens and dozens of others around the country.

- Well, the first thing I would say is it would be more fabulous and expansive than it is.

(laughs) And I think we have an extraordinary refine variety of programs for our students.

Secondly, I would think the expansion of more in demand jobs.

Now, we have many suggestions every year about why don't you offer this or offer something else?

If it's not an in-demand career or it doesn't meet the economic and workforce development data needs, we don't really offer it.

The other piece of that is the facilities.

We have lots of ideas about things that we could offer, but if you don't have a place to put them, that's an issue.

I think a third thing would be greater student enrollment in our programs from the standpoint of parents and adults, understanding what the true value is of a career in tech ed program.

If I was running the world, I would have everybody be in a career in tech ed program of some sort, even if it was for a year.

Something that's related to their interest.

People talk a lot about college and career readiness today.

I like to talk about career and college readiness.

Lastly, I think the enhanced competition among employers to hire the CTE completers of our program would be out there as well.

I can see the time 10 years from now that these employers would be knocking on the doors, fighting with each other about who it was they were going to hire.

At least I would hope that would be the case.

- Sure.

I'll put you on the spot.

You feel free to dodge the question.

Do you have a favorite CTE program?

- Oh, Mark.

(both laughs) - It's not fair.

- I know you'll-- It's like children, right?

You can't pick one out, but the one that just catches you.

- There are two or three that I would say are my champions because of their structure.

The engineering academy that we created many, many years ago is the only one in Ohio like it.

And it was created as a self-directed learning opportunity, a school within a school.

And we have had magnificent success with that program.

And it's the structure of that program that to me, is so phenomenal.

The structure of our new, relatively new now entrepreneurial academy is right up there in terms of not so much the content, but the structure of how it works and the involvement of so many mentors and other folks engaged with that program it's unbelievable.

Now that's from a structural perspective.

I think every one of our programs offers students that have that interest an absolutely high quality experience.

And I'm very proud of that because of what the teachers are able to provide.

- That's a great answer, thanks.

I know I put you on the spot.

(both laughs) The other question that I wanted to ask you is if you could take and spend a minute on the new program that you've offered this year on modern manufacturing.

- Well, I'll go back to what we opened this year.

At Cuyahoga Falls we opened an audio broadcast program, and those students will now be transitioning to Hudson High School to take a semester of video broadcast.

Now you better be careful, Mark because someday one of those students could be sitting there.

And some of those students, the students in the video piece here, we'll be using some of these facilities on occasions.

That's a brand new program for us.

So why did we do that?

Because a, there's a demand students were interested b, and thirdly, we had the facilities.

We would not need to go out and provide for a brand new studio when this exists and when Hudson High School has its own video class.

So the same thing at Cuyahoga Falls, they had an audio, your alma mater had an audio component.

So we jazzed that up with some new equipment and hired two new teachers for that component.

And we have two teachers here that are current teachers that are going to be working with students in the video.

That's another example of the fiscal efficiency of the sixth district educational compact.

Now next year, we're opening a new program at Stow-Munroe Falls High School called Modern Manufacturing for Employment.

And that will be a two-year program.

That's an example of people from business and industry coming to us and to one of the teachers there and saying, we're desperate.

We have to have employees.

So as part of our connection with Connexus NEO and you know they have three sectors that they're working with, IT, healthcare, and manufacturing.

The manufacturing representative Jenny Stopeka jumped right in and helped us and has been working with our teacher at Stow High School.

And we're going to have a fabulous program for students built around a specific involvement from business and industry and the university partner there for students if they're interested, we'll be Stark State.

- Good luck with that program.

- Oh, we're extremely excited about that.

And we think it has just great potential.

- I leave it there, thanks.

- Yeah.

- College may not be for everyone.

However, today there are more opportunities than ever for students to find something they love to do and for employers to find these students.

I wish some of these programs were around when I was in school.

According to the US Department of Education, there are 30 million jobs in the United States that do not require a bachelor's degree that pay median earnings of $55,000 or more.

Well, it might be overused and overused cliche is especially relevant here.

CTE programs are a win-win for everyone.

In our personal and professional lives today, we could use a few more win-wins.

Thanks for watching and listening.

Thank you, Mary Jane.

Let's keep our minds open and ears open until next time on Forum 360.

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