Pathways program works with students and community businesses in helping kids find their way in the workplace years before they graduate high school
Allison Powell is keeping her eye on all of the latest trends, looking for ways to turn them into profit.
Electronics is a booming business, Powell says, and the field is bound to expand and change in too many ways to count in the next few years. For Powell, the promise of wireless technology and circuit boards goes beyond the next new cell phone or the latest and coolest tablet computer. Powell said she wants to find a way to connect those innovations to her professional future.
“I’d like to start an electronics business. There’s a lot of call for that now,” Powell said.
Powell is 16. Yes, 16. The energized sophomore at Rangeview High School is a student in the school’s business pathway, a track that connects high school students with college-level specialization. Powell, who’s already making tentative plans to take classes at Johnson & Wales University before kickstarting her own business, has taken the message of the program to heart.
She’s not alone.
It’s tough to miss the effect of the new focus in classrooms across the Aurora Public Schools district. At middle and high schools across the city, the idea of early, career-based education has taken off.
What started four years ago with collaborations between schools like Aurora Central and the budding Anschutz Medical Campus on the former Fitzsimons Army base has grown to a district-wide system with four distinct branches. APS students can choose from pathways in arts and communication, business, health sciences and science, technology, engineering and math.
“I’d say we have to get away from the 20th-century model for K-12 education (that’s) focused on the same kind of experiences,” said APS Superintendent John Barry. He rarely misses an opportunity to point to global statistics when he talks about the pathways program: There are 52 million K-12 students in the U.S. That’s compared to a pool of 250 million students in China and India. “We’ve got to start thinking in a broader spectrum.”
In a marketing class at Rangeview High School taught by Kim Reiser, lessons about the seven steps of the sales process are the focus on one particular day. Students put together their own marketing videos, launched sales campaigns and created their own descriptions of products. On another side of the building, juniors are signed up in a digital electronics class that has them designing their own circuit boards and compiling work portfolios that can be submitted to college.
At Gateway High School, freshmen can sign up for the school’s new Human Performance Institute under the health sciences pathway, a structure that offers college credit through courses like anatomical kinesiology and exercise physiology. At the district’s newest high school, Vista PEAK, students can sign up for business administration and visual art and design institutes.
“They can qualify for college credit,” said Bill Petry, who teaches the digital electronics course for juniors at Rangeview. He added that they build a portfolio that can lead to college credits by the time students graduate high school. During a typical class session, Petry was showing instructional videos that were designed for college students at Dublin City University, videos that spelled out the mechanics of circuit building. “That’s where all the jobs are.”
That emphasis on connecting students with training that will lead to high-paying jobs in budding fields hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2012, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited the Vista PEAK campus on the southeastern edges of Aurora. He heard from APS Superintendent Barry, pathways instructors and students from the programs.
“I do think what you’re doing is pretty significant nationally,” Duncan said when he visited. “It’s amazing to me, in these tough economic times, how many CEOs I meet and the President meets who say, ‘We are desperately trying to hire right now and we can’t find (anyone) with the skills we need to fill our jobs.’”
The praise comes for a program that’s still relatively young. It has grown into a district-wide system that boasts partnerships throughout the local business community. University of Colorado Hospital, the Denver Art Museum and Raytheon figure among the local partners for the program, as does the City of Aurora itself.
In August, Barry and other district officials signed a formal agreement with Aurora that will see the district and the city sharing resources and facilities in the coming years, setting internships for APS students in city departments ranging from the city clerk’s office to the police.
“Between the city and the school district, we’ve worked together. … I believe that to really become that community and cement the relationship, we need to make it official. We need to engage in that Aurora contract,” said Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan. “We will move forward in cooperation.”