One of the biggest reasons students drop out of high school is due to relevancy, and the Vicksburg Warren School District is revolutionizing its approach to combat the issue.

Career and Technical Administrator Lucy DeRossette said students need to see why subject material is relevant to something important, such as gaining employment to keep them engaged.

“We have kids who take carpentry classes who build the most beautiful cabinets — things I’d pay top dollar to have in my home — and they cannot pass geometry,” she said. “So they drop out. They have not connected the dots that that’s all carpentry is, is geometry, making one plane match with another plane at a certain level.”

Times are changing, and education should too, DeRossette said.

“We’re teaching our kids like my grandmother learned with 20 kids in a classroom in five rows like little factory workers,” she said. “We now realize we can bring that relevance into the classroom and make it much more enjoyable if we focus it around a career theme.”

To do this, the district is in the process of introducing career academies over the next three years.

The first part, a keystone class where students first learn about the 16 different job clusters is being taught to ninth graders this year, but next year it will be taught to both eight and ninth graders, followed by only eighth graders the following year (2017-2018 school year).

After taking the keystone class, students will go into one of three specialized divisions: ACME (architecture, construction, mechatronics and engineering), CAB (communication, arts and business) or HHS (health and human services).

DeRossette said career academies bring the best of every part of education.

“They bring the thematic element of elementary school, because you know elementary teachers are awesome at doing themed projects,” she said. “Junior High does the teaming of teachers really well. You might have 80 kids in a pod that revolve all day with four teachers, so nobody falls through the cracks. There’s a lot of accountability.”

From the high school level, teachers bring the appropriate subject matter and in college the focus of having a major, DeRossette added.

“What this does is it takes the thematic unit from elementary, the teaming from junior high, the subject matter from high school and the focus from college and brings it all into the high school,” she said. “It brings that relevance.”

DeRossette said core courses, English, math, social studies and science, will be themed around a career cluster, which will have a centrally themed project each semester for the students in each group, bringing their career focus into the classroom where project-based learning can occur.

VWSD Superintendent Chad Shealy said there would be full pathways in each of the three segments with the ultimate goal of leading to employment.

“For example, in ACME, you’ve got pathways of architecture, construction, mechatronics and engineering,” he said.

“In that one pathway of engineering, you’ve got the opportunity to do a two-year certification you can get, a four-year engineering tech degree you can get or you can get a full engineering degree.”

The strands in the pathways will all be connected, and the students will all be learning together.

The difference, Shealy said, comes with the electives.

“If someone wants to be an engineer, their electives are going to be the higher level maths, and they’re going to be set up that take that intro to engineering course,” he said. “The core courses and that relevancy is what’s going to really benefit the kids.”

VWSD Board of Trustees President Bryan Pratt said not all students are going to college, but that’s the way the current education system measures success. This system addresses that and provides an array of other options students can take to contribute to a skilled workforce.

“College is an integral part of advancing your education and will greatly impact your earning potential in the future, but there are also some very good paying jobs out there,” he said.

“My doctor bill was cheaper than the last time my plumber came to see me.”

An exceptionally innovative district

Now that VWSD is a District of Innovation through the Mississippi Department of Education, there are several benefits available relating to the career academies.

The district is able to bring in working professionals to teach students without having a traditional teaching certificate.

“This becomes the model to which we invite those industry people in,” Shealy said. “Not only are they coming to do a presentation, but they’re actually teaching.”

Students are also able to start internships by their junior year through a seat-time waiver, meaning they will not be required to follow the state regulations requiring students to spend an allotted amount of time in the classroom setting.

“If I’m able to get a half-day for a kid to go somewhere, I can edit the other schedule times for the other classes for them to be able to flex for them to be able to do that,” Shealy said. “When they’re seniors they’ll do a capstone project where they research a particular field of study where they’ll put a portfolio together and do mock interviews.”

Another benefit from the District of Innovation status is the ability for students to get up to six high school credits while in junior high school, allowing them to pursue advanced studies later in high school.

“When you shave that year off, you’ve got junior year, mid-junior year and senior year that can be 100 percent college credit hours,” Shealy said. “We’re pushing for free dual credit.”

The district is working with Alcorn State University and Hinds Community College to secure at least four free dual credit classes for each student interested in pursuing this option.

By 2018, students will be graduating from the Vicksburg Warren School District with associate’s degrees or two years worth of college credits that can be transferred to a four-year university.

“We have one kid who got 19 college credit hours (through the Gateway to College program), and it didn’t cost him a dime other than what his momma pays in taxes,” Shealy said. “We wanted to know why we couldn’t do that with all of our other CTE classes that happening at Hinds, and they made it happen. We’re the only ones in the state doing that.”

 

Finding the right fit

Pratt said the academies offer a hands-on approach through internships, job shadowing and work study throughout high school to give students a better look at careers they may be interested in.

“It’s something other than just taking courses and trying to decide if they want to go to college or what their next step is after high school,” Pratt said. “It lets them experience it. It’s a new way of looking at it.”

Pratt said the strategy not only increases relevancy, but it saves students and their parents time and money in the future.

“It really goes back to trying to help children decide what they would like to do as they move forward and letting them make a decision and change their decision before they spend four years or two years in college trying to find out they don’t want to go into the medical field, either as a medical technician or as a doctor,” Pratt said.

The academies are set up to be flexible in the event a child rules out a particular future career path. Rather than students being forced to choose a future career at 13 or 14, they’re actually exploring potential career paths where they can either get a head start or rule out the career choice early on.

“We didn’t want anything if a child made it to their junior year and changed their mind for there to be units they had taken that wouldn’t be credited,” Shealy said. “Every time you change, you may have less going to the strand you wanted, but they’re still going to be graduation credits.”

Pratt said the challenge with any change is sometimes people don’t like change.

“But we can’t keep doing the same way and expect a different result,” he said. “We have to adapt and change, and you know what? We might try a few things that don’t work, but that’s ok. We’re going to try to do something with what we’ve been given.”

 

Building tomorrow’s workforce today

Pratt has called the academy system a great partnership with the community and local industries to build the workforces they’ll need for tomorrow.

“We’re creating those engineer technicians and engineers for ERDC and the medical technicians and nurses and doctors for hospitals and preparing our children for their future,” he said. “Every child needs to be prepared for what their next step is outside of our school system, and we’re making sure we’ve given them the opportunity to be successful. We need to be exposing our children to whatever they want to do and give them as many things as possible and preparing them for the type of jobs already available in Vicksburg so they don’t leave our community.”

Shealy said the district has already seen success with this model through working with local government and industry.

“Once we started talking to businesses, we found out they needed more firemen and EMTs,” he said. “In order to get more, they dropped the age down to 18, and we went in and got it to where I kids can get an EMT certification for free and go straight into the force. We did the same thing with LPNs.”

Vicksburg-Warren County Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Jane Flowers said everything is going to hinge on the participation of business and industry.

“It’s a real partnership,” she said. “I was in career and technical education for 30 years working with this community, and they have always supported getting good students.”

Hinds Community College Vicksburg Campus Dean Marvin Moak said the Vicksburg Warren School District has been great to work with and he’s looking forward to a long-term relationship.

“By getting students introduced to these studies, they’ll be more apt come in and finish those programs and as they go out into the workforce and see where they need updated skills or modified skills to either get a promotion or go to a different position, they’ll be able to come back to us and get those higher-end skills as well,” he said. “I felt this was a great opportunity for the community because it’s going to create a 21st century workforce here in the Warren County area, and having that workforce is what’s going to draw business and industry to the area and retain business that’s already here,” he said.

Moak said this is a huge opportunity for the Vicksburg and Warren County community. “No other community in the state of Mississippi has a partnership like the one the district and Hinds have developed.”