These Kids Get It

From the outbox of Meyer’s inbox:

It’s always encouraging to find a story that can best be summed up as “they get it.” If the children are our future then we can rest assured that the student featured in this article from Atlantic City “get it” when it comes to learning the trades. If only we lived in a world where nothing had to be built or fixed. Luckily for us, these kids are going to be taking care of business.

High School Career, Tech Classes Let Students Try Out Fields by Edward Van Embden writing for Press of Atlantic City

Nate Norcross, 18, suggested they remove the relevant coil, clean it, put it back in and then run the diagnostics to see if anything had changed. Norcross is not a mechanic – yet. He’s a student in Millville Senior High School’s auto shop program.

Auto shop is one of 18 Career and Technical Education courses serving more than 400 students at the school.

Diane Garrison, CTE Department chairwoman, said the programs in Millville have grown and evolved to meet student interest and local job demands. Courses such as Web page design, nursing and even entrepreneurship have been added in the past few years.

“This is not just for students who are going right into a career,” she said. “This is for the students who are pursuing post-secondary education as well.”

As the academic demands of high school have increased, and budgets have been squeezed, many vocational or technical programs have been eliminated or relegated to county vocational high schools.

Each of the state’s 21 counties has a separate vocational high school, but Cumberland County’s still operates on a shared-time basis, with students attending half the day at their local high school for academic courses and half at the at Technical Education Center. Not all students can manage the split schedule, so local high schools have tried to maintain vocational programs.

Check out the rest of the article here.