Steel Dynamics Inc., a local manufacturing company, wanted student help recruiting young women and candidates from different ethnic groups that don’t often seek manufacturing jobs.

“They’re kind of expanding their outreach,” Gebhard told a classroom of juniors and seniors, all deciding between eight business and non-profit project challenges to spend the spring working on. They’re kind of rebuilding recruitment from the ground up
so your job is to create some marketing around that.”

But Gebhard wanted students to consider another level, a more personal one, as they made their choice, telling them to carefully pick the project that fits a passion or teaches them a key skill toward a career goal. 

That’s the overall mission of Amp Lab, after all. Still in its infancy, the school launched in 2022 with a very different goal from a typical high school: 

Developing an entrepreneurial mindset that applies across multiple careers or businesses, especially companies they might start themselves. 

Though many high schools boast of creating good work opportunities for students, few have overcome the schedule and transportation hurdles to place students in internships, even when companies want them. Only about 6% of high school students nationally have the chance to do an internship or apprenticeship, the best available estimates show.

Amp Lab’s model is built around giving every student the opportunity to work with local businesses, going beyond even some of the more ambitious schools in the country. The school also focuses on building mastery of personal skills — including insight, persistence, problem solving, turning problems into opportunities — alongside broad business skills such as financial management, legal analysis, marketing, sales and operations.

“Always think of it this way: How does this matter to you 10 years from now?” Gebhard told students. “Like, what is this going to do for you 10 years from now?”

Amp Lab doesn’t look or feel like a typical high school. For starters, its full name is Amp Lab at , referring to the massive 38-acre factory complex that was a General Electric motor plant for decades before being renovated and re-opening as home to the school and several area businesses in 2022.

Open to high school juniors and seniors from across the Ft. Wayne Community Schools — half of its 400 students coming in the morning and half coming in the afternoon — Amp Lab is officially a career technical school. But it doesn’t teach the auto repair, construction and plumbing skills offered at typical career training centers.

Its only focus is entrepreneurship. 

“In most traditional CTE centers, you’ve got a bunch of individual programs that are all separate,” said founding Principal Riley Johnson. “What we chose to do here was kind of flip that equation. Every kid that comes to Amp Lab is in the entrepreneurship pathway, and their connection to industry skill is across all potential career clusters.”

“We look at entrepreneurship as a mindset and a tool set that a kid can apply, whether they’re in banking or veterinary science or cosmetology.”

Work-based learning is a key part of the model. so Amp Lab has students engage with businesses in the spring and in the fall using three different methods:

• Every junior takes on at least one group project for a local business, such as the one Gebhart described, that they do mostly at school with some visits to the company.
• Students can choose to start their own business by developing a product and a marketing plan. They either make it themselves or hire a company to make it, and then sell it.
• About half do a traditional internship working at a local company about 10 to 15 hours a week.

“Our goal is that, in some form or fashion, every kid gets an external experience, but we’re not there yet,” Riley said.

Regardless of the approach, teachers evaluate how student skills are growing and weigh the growth of students’ mindset as much as teachers in traditional high schools weigh progress in math and English. That progress is all reported to students, parents and colleges on an innovative but still-developing supplement to traditional report cards called a Mastery Learning Record that shows how well students are moving toward mastering a skill, rather than just giving them an A-F grade at the end of a quarter.

Amp Lab is one of 40 schools nationally testing the Learning Record as it is refined.

How the Learning Record works with those schools will help inform an effort by six states and others to test, measure and report student progress on so-called “durable skills,” the first being collaboration, communication and critical thinking. Amp Lab is just one data point as new report cards are developed, but the school was recently highlighted by the non-profit XQ Institute for embracing an innovation it wants high schools to adopt nationally.

“These competencies aren’t easy to convey in a conventional report card or transcript,” XQ wrote in its recent report, The Future Is High School, calling the learning record “far more detailed and nuanced.”

“The Amp Lab record documents exactly which competencies students have mastered, such as intuitive agility, collaborative intelligence, and — yes — entrepreneurial spirit,” XQ added.

The work-based “challenges,” as the school calls them, can look different for every student.

When Amp Lab launched, the school had to seek out businesses willing to work with students. on these projects. Now, it has more applications than it needs, and can tell businesses to refine them and apply again later. The goal isn’t just to invent a project for students, but have them work on a problem the business is truly facing and have the work matter.

This spring, students are picking from eight businesses and non-profits, including: the Steel Dynamics project; designing and testing a part for another manufacturer; helping a local nonprofit spread messages aimed at improving maternal health; designing a plan to encourage vegetable gardening in a low-income neighborhood; or designing and creating murals to promote a historic arena in the city.

Sometimes the projects line up well with student interests. Senior Tyreece Menifee Jr., who wants to be both a barber and fashion designer, worked last year designing costumes and marketing for a production of A Christmas Carol by the Ft. Wayne Youth Theater.

He then created his own mini business by designing a hooded sweatshirt — picking the fabric, background design and the lettering for it — and ordering a batch of 20 from a Pakistani company online. He’s now selling the hoodies for $90 on a website he created.

“I’ve learned a lot of stuff here, just being here,” Menifee said. “I feel like the environment changes your mindset. You get focused on what you need to do.”

Senior Ruby Campbell-Carpenter used her interest in animals to create a pet food business called Tailored Bites. She talked with a veterinary clinic, the county health department and a meat company that school staff helped her connect with, to create a chicken based dog food — one that passed taste tests of several dogs — that she and a classmate then sold at a farmers market.

She also interned at a veterinary office through the school last spring, which turned into a part-time job last summer and helped confirm her plans to become a vet.

“Amp Lab is very growth oriented,” she said. “They grade you based on if you’re growing, if you’re learning,” she said. “Amp Lab also has so many connections, compared to your typical high school. They honestly have connections to pretty much every business.”

Sometimes the school finds internships with businesses or nonprofits right at the Electric Works complex, letting students work without needing transportation from the school.

Those include a health clinic, an advertising agency, a manufacturer of steel decking and the nonprofit REFINERY — Robotics Education, Fabrication and Innovation Nexus: Entrepreneurship for Rising Youth — a giant open maker space that robotics teams from local high schools can use as a workshop. It also serves as a central bulk purchaser for those teams.

Interns like senior Alfy Krider, a member of the robotics team of Northrop High School where she goes to class every morning, spends her afternoon Amp Lab time organizing equipment and the space for teams to test their robots, even 3D printing parts or ordering parts for them. 

She doesn’t mind helping competitors as his job.

“Robotics really promotes gracious professionalism, which is helping out other teams as much as you can,” she said. “It’s just so much of a culture of helping everyone out, because when you need help, they’ll be there for you.”

Along with letting Krider immerse herself in the business of robotics, the company benefits hugely from student help.

“They’ve been instrumental in getting everything, honestly, built up,” said Briana Smedberg, vice president of BioNanomics, the nonprofit in charge of the space, before rattling off a list of jobs interns accomplished. “The students built all of this”

Johnson said internships like this — that let students interact with others and fill a professional role — matter as much as any class or credential.

“The resume portfolio is as powerful of a tool as anything,” he said. “We found having something like this as a door opener and as a networking tool is just as valuable as as any other currency.”

“In high school, a lot of students will be like, ‘Oh, what happens if they don’t like this aspect of me?” said Sheikh Ali, 17, a student at Fridley High School just north of Minneapolis. “What happens if I’m not intelligent enough for this role? What happens if I can’t communicate enough?”

On a whim, Sheikh Ali applied to Genesys Works, one of the country’s largest high school internship programs, and was accepted. Her confidence grew as she learned communication and technical skills at the national organization’s summer training sessions.

Now, just a few months later, she’s thriving as an intern at headquarters of the SPS Commerce software company in downtown Minneapolis, working on the technology helpdesk aiding employees with computer and other device issues. 

“When I saw the fruits of my labor, I was stunned,” she said.

The Genesys Works non-profit has been working with students like Sheikh Ali since launching in Houston in 2002 with a goal of connecting high school students to paid internships that go beyond typical afterschool jobs and can start them on paths to fulfilling careers, often in the white collar world. 

Such internships are rare despite all the lofty talk nationwide about creating more work-based learning opportunities for students that let them try out different fields and can lead to good-paying careers. Fewer than five percent of high schoolers have a chance to do an internship or apprenticeship before graduating, according to federal data and surveys by the American Student Assistance nonprofit.

But Genesys Works has found a formula that gives companies — not just nervous teens — the structure and confidence to succeed with internships. Genesys Works has placed nearly 1,100 students in internships at 202 companies in eight metropolitan areas this school year: Chicago, Houston, Jacksonville, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York, San Francisco, Tulsa and Washington, D.C.

While many work in small, local companies, interns are also landing spots at corporate giants like Target, Accenture, 3M and Medtronic, often in the information technology, marketing or human resources departments. Students typically work 15 to 20 hours a week their senior year for $14 to $18 an hour, depending on the market. 

“We’re focused on building careers and building pathways for students and giving them access to what it looks like to work in a corporate environment and to be part of a team,” said Mandy Hildenbrand, Genesys Works chief services officer.

Helping students find out if a career is right for them or what skills and certifications they should pursue in college is incredibly meaningful to success. 

“We want to make sure that we’re putting students in those types of roles,” Hildenbrand said.

Genesys Works’ model, in which the non-profit acts like a hiring and staffing agency, is key in clearing a major block to high school internships nationally — coaxing companies wary of hiring high school students to take the leap. 

Genesys Works takes on duties that companies often don’t want to bother with, removing administrative burdens that scare many employers away. These include recruiting students and reviewing applications, pairing students with mentors, working with schools so students have time to work and acting as students’ employer of record so interns are on Genesys Works’ payroll and covered by the nonprofit’s insurance.

Genesys Works also adds another step that only a few internship programs do well — training students before sending them to companies. Genesys Works has each student complete an eight-week summer training program of professional conduct and some technical skills, including use of Microsoft Office applications.

In return, companies pay Genesys Works about twice the students’ hourly wages.

“Everybody wants work-based learning, but it’s very difficult to figure out how to do it,” said Hildenbrand. “We take the heavy lifting off of the schools and off of the corporate partners.”

Allison Barmann, executive director of Genesys Works in Minneapolis, the city with the most interns in the program, said the support structure makes a big difference to employers.

“Sometimes we’ll talk to corporate partners who are like, ‘Oh, well, we’ve never had a high school internship before. Like, that’s too much work’,” Barmann said. “No, no, we’re doing the hard part for you. You just have to find some work for these young people to do and find a good supervisor to help challenge them.”

Peggy Krendl, a senior managing partner of the Fortune 500 company Accenture, agreed that Genesys Works’ model makes it much easier for a company that doesn’t have youth training programs or staff to hire younger, short-term employees. Companies also rarely have relationships with school districts that allow students to miss class to work.

Accenture has taken on the second-most interns through Genesys Works nationally, behind only medical technology giant Medtronic. 

“We don’t have to worry about that at all, so it’s an entire infrastructure and onboarding support network that we get working with Genesys Works,” said Krendl.

The summer training is a big part of that support, especially for teenagers who have never held a professional job. Students spend eight weeks in the summer between junior and senior year learning six bundles of skills — communication, time and project management, work ethic and professionalism, problem solving and critical thinking, collaboration and teamwork, and initiative and independent work. 

Students are then evaluated three times over the summer on their progress to determine their “workforce readiness.” Students are rated as to how well and often they show traits including punctuality, taking feedback well, willingness to learn and for setting plans with timelines for completing tasks.

Students are even rated on how well they stay attentive and participate in online sessions.

“We have to keep you guys engaged and focused,” instructor Ravin Boihr told students at a training session last summer. “During your internships, you may be on screen four hours a day, the same way you are here, and your supervisor is counting on you to remain active and engaged in getting your work completed.”

She stressed: “We have to make sure that we confidently are placing you guys to them.”

Lauren Loeffler, who manages interns for SPS, said students may come without specific skills, but those that make it through Genesys Works hiring process always view the job as part of building a career and want to do well. She said she sees few of the problems — behavior, tardiness, lack of work ethic — some employers might imagine in hiring students this young.

“The earlier they can kind of be exposed to the workforce, the farther ahead they’re going to be when it comes time to find that full time job,” Loeffler said. “To answer some questions that might scare future employers — like they kind of make this story up in their head — I have never seen a behavior issue. I have never seen students blatantly doing a bad job because they don’t care, they don’t like it. They are extremely motivated to do a good job.”

Land O’ Lakes, the dairy and agricultural products company based just outside Minneapolis, is so invested in the program that it takes about a dozen interns from Genesys Works each year. The interns, as at most companies, don’t work directly with the core products and services — they don’t actually make the butter at your local grocery store — but in information technology, security or other support services.

Luke Kocon, telecommunications manager for Land O’ Lakes, has two interns a year in his department, typically helping manage distribution of computers and phones to employees.

Kocon said the first few weeks are a big adjustment as students acclimate to a new culture and expectations, but they learn quickly.

“It’s mutually beneficial,” he said. “There’s definitely a ramp up period, right? But my two interns that are with us right now are delivering just as any member of my team.”

“They usually surprise me with how much they can get done and how quickly they adjust to the workflows,” he added.

Salim Kadi, a senior at Blaine High School north of the city, said his internship at Land O’ Lakes is an adjustment from a previous job he had as a cashier at Target, which was more focused on rapid-fire work with customers than handling several projects on a deadline. While his tasks are not an exact match for his hopes of working in computer science after college, he is excited for the rest of this year.

“It helps me gain experience and (understand) how the corporate world works,” Kadi said. “Even if I don’t get a position that’s like my career, I still learn how to be more professional in a corporate setting. I can also learn how to network and talk to other people too. And I can still ask about things that I want to learn about, that’s going to align with my future career.”

Land O’ Lakes, like many other companies in the program, often keeps interns even after their senior year as they move on to college. Yareni Flores, now pursuing an associates degree at Century College, remains with Land O’ Lakes’ information technology department two years after finishing her senior year in the internship.

Flores, 18, said the internship taught her a lot of professional skills.

“Back in high school, you wouldn’t really see me being here because I did not like talking to people,” Flores said. “It was my first ever job too, so I learned how to manage my time more, and how to be more responsible.”

Sheikh Ali, like Flores, said the internship can really help students grow. So she urged students to overcome their hesitancy and make the leap.

“It’s something that you really have to push for,” she said. “You really have to just try hard.I feel like having courage to pursue Genesys works is something that’s really needed.”

In the thick of the summer, 10 high school and college students sat in the empty library of MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta — Red Cloud — High School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. There, they recited everyday phrases in Lakota, the language spoken by the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the nation’s largest.

TaƋyáƋ niĆĄtíƋma he? Did you sleep well? 

OkĂłihaƋke k’uƋ heháƋ tȟabwaĆĄkate. Last weekend I played basketball.

Táku wičhókaƋ wótapi he? What’s for lunch?

The students were paid participants in the school’s annual summer language internship program, learning the language and culture to teach others — and posting videos of themselves speaking, translating and describing everyday activities in Lakota.

It’s part of MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta’s mission to preserve the 1,000-year-old language, which is in danger of being erased because it is to younger generations.

Opened in 1888, MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta (mah-PEE-yah loo-tah) was one of many boarding schools the U.S. government created to culturally assimilate and “” Native Americans. Roughly 19,000 children were taken from their families and forced to attend. The schools made the children use English names, cut their hair and prohibited them from speaking their language, according to a 2022 federal .

“Boarding school rules were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment such as solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing,” the report said. as a result of abuse and inhumane conditions.

While the Lakota population is more than 170,000 strong, there are fewer than , according to the Lakota Language Consortium. Most are in their 70s.

Ashlan Carlow-Blount, 17, didn’t grow up speaking Lakota, but discovered a passion for it in high school. She joined the internship to improve her speaking skills and share the language with other young people.

“Our ancestors couldn’t speak it — if they spoke it, it was like a punishment for them,” Ashlan said. “That’s why we lost our language, because they were so afraid to speak it and they didn’t pass it down. That’s why it’s important to us to [do this], because we have the opportunity to speak it freely now and then keep it going.”

The summer internship is the next step toward fluency for students who have completed other Lakota classes. For two months, they learn through singing, activities, group conversations and lectures. This year’s group began to — sometimes receiving thousands of views.

Learn some Lakota sentences with us!!

“Our summer interns kind of put [the program] on the map, and it was a good outlet for them to showcase what they’re learning and also showcase how language could be used in the day-to-day,” said Jennifer Irving, MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta’s communications director. 

Mya Mills, 17, said a lot of teens know basic Lakota words and speak some at home but aren’t fluent. The internship has helped her speak the language outside of school, and older adults have told her how much they appreciate students trying to bring Lakota back.

“That’s the point — for us still to try to keep it going,” she said. “Even when we’re around people who don’t speak it.”

MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta’s internship is only one piece of its mission to increase Lakota fluency, Irving said. The school of 500 students created a dual language immersion program in 2019 that has since expanded from kindergarten through eighth grade. About 90% of classes are taught in Lakota, so students can become fluent early on instead of catching up in later years.

The movement to revitalize and preserve native languages in schools has boomed in recent decades, Irving said. Immersion schools and language preservation programs have increased in and other states like , and . In December, the Biden administration published a 10-year , which called for action to address the U.S. government’s role in the loss of Native American languages. The program’s future is unclear under the Trump administration.

“I think 40 years ago, our education system in this country was very different — very much reading, writing, arithmetic,” Irving said. “We all see now, not just with tribal languages or Lakota language, but we see the benefits for students that are in immersion classrooms and in immersion schools.”

Researchers that Native American students in bilingual programs scored higher on English language standardized tests than those who received education in an English-only program. Including indigenous languages and culture in school curriculum have also been identified as ways to improve chronic absenteeism for Native American students, according to a from the national nonprofit Attendance Works.

The Minneapolis American Indian Center, which serves more than 35,000 Native Americans in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, created a in 2019 that teaches youth the Dakota and Ojibwe languages. Coordinator Memegwesi Sutherland said he’s seen students have “life-changing experiences” after being exposed to their language and culture for the first time.

“Most schools don’t offer much for a Native education,” he said. “Students who do take my class end up learning a lot — they want to reconnect with their people, relearn their language and culture, and sometimes their [college] majors change and they ask me how they can keep learning it.”  

Kiana Richards, a 2017 MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta graduate, became so passionate about Lakota while in high school that she earned an associate degree in the language. She joined AmeriCorps and worked as a MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta employee from 2018 to 2020. But she stopped speaking Lakota when the pandemic struck, and after several years realized her fluency had “completely faded away.”

Last year, she rejoined AmeriCorps to refresh her Lakota skills and teach students about the language and culture.

“I wanted to continue to keep doing this for the sake of my own self, my identity, my Lakota identity, and for the sake of me wanting to be an immersion teacher,” she said. “I want to encourage the [students] so much, because it is a part of who we are.”

Tylia Mad Plume, a 2023 MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta graduate, said she initially cared only about getting a decent grade in high school Lakota classes. But after an educator encouraged her to work with children, she joined AmeriCorps to help teach while taking language classes herself.

Both Mad Plume and Richards were fired from AmeriCorps this spring, when the Trump administration from the national service organization. The school used its own budget to hire them as staff for the summer internship.

Many MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta staff come from AmeriCorps. Funding has since been reinstated to Democratic-led states that sued, but the school is still waiting for a solution as a named plaintiff in a lawsuit that seeks a in every state. 

“I think it’s important to keep going, to keep the Lakota Nation sovereign, because it’s really scary with everything going on right now,” Mad Plume said. “You have to keep that because in history, for the people who didn’t keep it or the tribes who weren’t as strong in their language and culture, it’s gone.”

Richards said she’s excited for the future because while Lakota wasn’t passed down through generations in the past, she believes the current generation will bring it back. 

This is foretold in the Lakotas’ seventh generation prophecy, she said — a made in the 1800s by Lakota holy man that after generations of great suffering, the Lakota of the seventh generation — the current generation — will take back what little culture and rights remain to spur positive change for the future.

“Here we are in that moment,” Richards said. “I feel like it’s coming full circle, because now we’re teaching the [children] how to speak Lakota and some of them are more fluent than I am. It’s amazing to see, and that’s what encourages me and inspires me. It’s so important because it connects us to who we are, in our spirits, our knowledge.”

Correction: The name of the Twin Cities cultural center is the Minneapolis American Indian Center.

“This isn’t school,” Robinson, a business owner, told the teenagers at the early June launch of the ProX internship program. “This is a summer internship. You all have employers.”

You can’t just skip a day or come in late, said Robinson. If something happens that gets in the way, you need to call your employer. You can’t be on your phones all day. Each employer will have a cell phone policy to learn, along with dress codes. And work hours must be entered online.

It’s a lot for some of the 660 new interns from across the Kansas City area, some as young as 15 and whose internships are their first job ever. Many have never had a boss or a work schedule before, so working alongside adults can be intimidating, said Robinson and program head Solissa Franco-McKay.

ProX, short for “professional experience,” has created one of the strongest and most structured support systems for interns in the country, hoping to solve a challenge that regularly scares away employers and trips up high school interns anywhere — student and business expectations not matching up. 

Each student has a coach hired by the program they meet weekly, as well as a mentor who is an employee at the business. ProX also sets aside every Monday of the internship as “professional development” to work on so-called “soft skills,” such as punctuality, teamwork and communication, which many teens lack and employers want.

“This is a starting point of a journey for you,” Franco-McKay told the students. “This is about growing your network, growing your skills, and just doing a little exploration
You have your coaches who help, guide and support you along the way.”

“If you mess up, that’s alright. That’s what it’s about, right?” she stressed. ”And we’re going to be doing it together.”

Providing all the training and support for students and companies has one big drawback, however: It limits how many students the program can serve. 

ProX had 3,000 students apply for spots this summer, so the majority had to be turned away. The program’s budget has already grown from $1 million at its start to $4 million today. More coaches and other staff would need to be hired to accommodate every student.

The ProX program, launched in 2021 by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, is a rare opportunity for high school students with paid summer internships for five weeks each summer that let them test drive a career they may want to pursue.

Though internships are common for college students, there are few for high schoolers. Only about five percent of high school students have a chance at an internship or a more advanced apprenticeship, either in summers or during the school year. 

That’s partly because U.S, companies, unlike those in Europe where internships and apprenticeships are common, don’t always trust high school students with business tasks.

A 2024 survey by American Student Assistance, a nonprofit that promotes career opportunities for students, found companies listed the work needed to select good interns and manage them were among the biggest barriers to hiring high schoolers.

It’s left to outside agencies like ProX to manage internships for many companies, finding interns, teaching them soft skills and verifying they can handle the workplace. The more those agencies take on for the companies, the easier it is for a business to hire students for the summer.

“When we were first created, it was really about making this as plug-and-play for the employer as possible,” said Franco-McKay. “We want the employer to kind of see us as a common front door.”

“If you’re wanting to engage with students here in Kansas City, you can come to the ProX program and we’ll handle all the paperwork,” she added. “We hire the interns. We pay them the stipend. We track their hours. The employer really just has to focus on providing a quality experience and mentoring them.”

ProX isn’t the only agency, often known as “intermediaries,” taking on training and hiring interns to help companies. The nonprofit Boston Public Industry Council manages that city’s extensive summer jobs program for the city and school district. Though many students are taught basic soft skills at school there, Executive Director Neil Sullivan said employers rely on PIC staff to meet with students and vouch for them being ready to handle work.

The Genesys Works high school internship program in eight cities including Houston, Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., is another. It also makes teaching soft skills as much a priority as ProX. Students spend the summer before their internships learning several skills — communication, time and project management, work ethic, problem solving, collaboration, and initiative — and are rated on each one. They are placed in internships only if they score well.

“It’s meant to be broad, so that students go into their internship on day one with the baseline skills that they need,” said Mandy Hildrenbrand, chief services officer for Genesys Works. “The internship then can train them in more specific skills to their internship “

The ProX internship program has made training an integral part of the internships since it was started by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, named for the pharmaceutical magnate best known as the former owner of the Kansas City Royals baseball team.

The internship isn’t a full-time job. It pays a stipend of $1,250 for 25 hours a week for five weeks, less than some fast food and retail jobs pay per hour. But the internships aim to give students a taste of potential careers and practice navigating the job application and hiring process, rather than just be a way to earn money during summer break.

ProX also prioritizes bringing in students from low-income neighborhoods, so it offers students money to buy work uniforms if needed or rides to work through zTrip, a local rideshare company.

“Our program is really focused on breaking down any barriers that may exist to student participation,” said Franco-McKay.

That’s a big reason why ProX invests heavily in coaches and training. Each Monday, interns spend a half day at the Ewing Marion Kauffman School in the city to learn about a different skill each week — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, leadership and understanding one’s own thinking process.

In addition, while each of the 95 companies in the program assigns an employee mentor to each intern, ProX hires educators like Kristi Larison, a teacher at Liberty North High School in a neighboring suburb, to be a coach and liaison between interns and companies. Larison has 19 students to follow this summer, visiting them at their companies once a week and discussing their goals for each week and the summer.

“We know kids and we know job sites, so we’re going to kind of pull them through,” she said. “I had a lot of students last year that relied heavily on me with questions, because maybe they didn’t quite have skills to communicate with the employer yet, or they were too timid. I really was a bridge to kind of help them learn how to do that on their own. I think that’s critical.”

Don Simon, another coach who teaches at suburban Smithville High School, said he believes the coaching helps students who may have never had a job before. Having coaches also reassures employers that they are not alone in supporting students.

“A lot of our employers have experience with college internship programs, but not really high school,” Simon said. “For the kids to have a coach with them, that really sort of seals the deal for a lot of employers. They’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do this’.”

Some students, like Bradley Epps, an incoming senior at Park Hill High School, are so directed in their goals they’d rather just work on Mondays instead of having workplace training. An aspiring architect, he’s still excited, though, to intern at the architecture and urban planning-focused Kansas City Design Center.

“I think it will give me some experience,” he said. “And, if I had any doubts, it will give me a chance to see for myself.”

Others appreciate both the instruction and a chance to test out a career. 

Trisha Rastogi just graduated from Blue Valley High School south of the city and hopes to be a cancer researcher. She said a chance at real work experience at Children’s Mercy Hospital, even in the public health department, is a great opportunity for her.

“I want to become a physician, which is healthcare at a more individual level,” she said. “But I also like that I’m doing this internship because it gives me exposure to healthcare at a community level too.”

Natalie Watts loves her computer science classes at Campbell High School. The junior has studied everything from coding robots to creating online computer games and was initially attracted to the career track because of the technological skills she could gain and the high-paying jobs that could follow. 

But when Watts recently participated in a presentation highlighting Campbell’s STEM programs, she received an unexpected question from the audience: Is being in the program “like going to an all-boys school?”

In the 2022-23 school year, 70% of students in Campbell’s information technology classes were boys. The school had a similar gender gap in its architecture and science programs. 

Watts has always felt supported and welcomed by her male peers and teachers, but she also wants more girls to see computer science and engineering as a part of their futures. 

Campbell is one of 46 Hawaii public high schools enrolling students in career and technical education courses, which provide hands-on learning, internships and training to prepare students for life after graduation. Students usually enroll in a single CTE program throughout high school, taking multiple classes related to careers in fields such as nursing, teaching and engineering. 

The number of students enrolled in CTE pathways has exploded in Hawaii in recent years, amid debates about how to help students secure high-paying jobs after graduation and combat the state’s high cost of living. Nearly two-thirds of the class of 2023 participated in a high school CTE program. 

But the programs  across the state. 

In the 2022-23 school year, boys made up nearly 75% of Hawaii CTE programs focused on STEM and information technology, and roughly 70% of programs focused on manufacturing. On the other hand, girls made up three-quarters of health care programs like nursing. 

Researchers say these patterns reflect and reinforce larger trends in the state’s workforce, where men dominate lucrative careers such as engineering and computer science. Statewide, women make 86 cents for every dollar men earn, in part because of which careers they pursue,  from the University of Hawaii. 

Federal legislation requires states to track gender enrollment in these programs and dedicate funds to address enrollment disparities that help perpetuate longstanding  and shut women out of higher-paying opportunities. But many states — including Hawaii — have made little progress in closing the gender gap over the past five years. 

Hawaii has slightly better success than mainland districts in getting boys interested in careers in education — and has equal participation in some career tracks like business and hospitality — but the state is lagging behind the national average when it comes to enrolling girls in fields most likely to lead to high-paying jobs in the future.

The Hawaii Department of Education declined multiple interview requests for this story, but individual principals say they are exploring a range of strategies to address the problem, from career fairs highlighting women in STEM to presentations encouraging middle schoolers to keep their minds open about future jobs. Outside organizations and employers have also stepped in to help schools close gender gaps.

But efforts vary by school, and some CTE coordinators say the state isn’t doing enough to help schools create gender-balanced programs.

“There’s no real systematic approach,” said Jeremy Seitz, who leads the engineering CTE program at Farrington High School. 

Federal Funds And Few Plans 

Eden Ledward is the face of the University of Hawaii’s CTE carpentry program. A minute-long video on the university’s website shows Ledward building houses, studying construction plans and operating a handsaw as she explains how CTE classes help her pursue her passion for building.  

“My classmates and instructors are solid, and we get real experience doing real work,” she says to the camera. 

The promotional video is the product of federal funds Hawaii receives annually to support CTE programs at the high school and college level under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. Of the $7 million the federal government provided Hawaii for its CTE programs in 2024, the state was required to set aside $60,000 to address gender disparities.

Many of these dollars have gone toward creating promotional videos posted on the . The videos feature students who are pursuing CTE programs that have traditionally been dominated by a single gender, such as construction or nursing, said Warren Kawano, career pathways and strategy director at the organization .

UH isn’t required to report on the outcomes of specific gender equality initiatives using Perkins funds, and it’s difficult to measure the impact of these marketing campaigns, Kawano said. But he hopes the videos help broaden students’ understanding of the careers they can pursue. 

“If you’re interested, there’s a place for you,” he said.  

The state Department of Education gets about $1.4 million a year of the state’s Perkins funding. In the past, department spokesperson Kimi Takazawa said, schools have used some of the federal funds to purchase safety gear for girls in CTE programs, bring in female guest speakers to speak about their experiences in STEM fields, and more.

But the department could not say how much money was spent on initiatives around gender equality and doesn’t track in detail how schools use the funds. 

Schools receive Perkins funds based on the number of students enrolled in their CTE programs, said Waiākea High School Principal Kelcy Koga, but staff have a lot of flexibility in how the funds can be used. Waiākea has used the money on everything from hiring CTE staff to running a daylong program teaching elementary and middle school girls about robotics and engineering.

State leaders have said that equity and access in these programs is paramount, but there are few details on how they will achieve that. When the state submitted a comprehensive plan in 2020 to the federal government outlining how it would improve equity and enrollment in its CTE programs, there was not a single mention of how Hawaii would close its gender gap in the 157-page document.

That doesn’t mean that the state disregarded the issue completely, Kawano said, since the $60,000 designated for gender equality is only a small portion of the funding Hawaii uses for CTE. It’s up to the education department and individual schools, he said, to determine how to achieve greater equality in their CTE programs. 

Since the plan’s implementation, the state has made some progress, but the change hasn’t been the same across all programs. The proportion of girls enrolled in STEM programs rose from 20% to 27% between 2020 and 2022, but the percentage of boys participating in the health science career track stayed roughly the same, at 25%. 

‘Highly Segregated By Gender’

Hawaii is not alone in this.

A 2024 analysis from the U.S. Department of Education found that high school girls earned roughly the same number of CTE credits in architecture and construction in 2019 as they did in 1990. At the same time, the gap between the number of boys and girls in CTE health care programs grew as female students enrolled in classes at higher rates.   

“These results underscore the need for continued leadership in this space and an urgent, strategic focus on better engaging females in career pathways that lead to good jobs,” U.S. DOE Assistant Secretary for Career, Technical and Adult Education Amy Loyd wrote last year. “CTE programs in some career clusters remain highly segregated by gender, as do the occupations for which they prepare students.”

A number of factors can explain states’ ongoing challenges in achieving gender equality in career-based learning, said Emily Passias, deputy executive director of the national advocacy group Advance CTE. Gender gaps may persist as students gravitate toward the same classes as their friends, she said, or feel family pressure to pursue traditional careers. Sometimes, she added, CTE programs like welding may not have equipment specially fitted for girls, further enforcing gender stereotypes. 

“Those are things that signal to young people, I’m welcome or not welcome here,” she said.  

Some schools have shown that it’s possible to address gender segregation in CTE. 

Roughly half of students in STEM programs in the District of Columbia were girls in the 2021-22 school year, compared to the national average of 30%. The district said its success comes from teaching girls about careers in STEM from a young age and hosting career fairs and guest speakers emphasizing the importance of gender diversity in fields such as health care and engineering. 

But efforts in Hawaii are mostly piecemeal.

When Jeremy Seitz began teaching engineering and design technology classes at Farrington High School in 2008, all his students were boys. Roughly a quarter of students in the school’s engineering program are now girls. 

Making engineering classes a more welcoming place for girls has taken time, Seitz said. Growing up in Kalihi, he said, students have few opportunities to explore career options, and girls are often expected to stay home and take care of their younger siblings. 

The school brings in female engineers as guest speakers, Seitz said, and high school girls visit nearby middle schools to give lessons and show younger students what it’s like to study construction and architecture. 

Watts, the junior studying computer science at Campbell High School, is working with classmates on events that encourage girls to sign up for STEM programs. 

“If you want to do it, you should do it,” Watts tells younger students. “Don’t let male domination keep you from doing what you want to do.” 

‘You Just Have To Keep Trying’

There’s been little statewide effort to make sure all programs are taking similar steps. The state education department has occasionally completed equity audits of schools’ CTE programs, Seitz said, but he hasn’t seen any action taken based on that data.   

The CTE program at Waipahu High School, formerly under the leadership of Superintendent Keith Hayashi, is considered one of the trailblazers in providing career-based learning to all students during their four years on campus. Over 90% of Waipahu’s graduating class of 2023 participated in CTE, and the school opened a  hosting the culinary and natural resources programs just over a year ago. 

“It’s an opportunity for us in the department to lead change not only in Hawaii but, I believe, across the country,” Hayashi said at the learning center’s grand opening in December 2023. 

Even the state’s premier CTE school has significant gender gaps in its health care and engineering programs. Only 15% of students in the industrial and engineering technology program are girls. Meanwhile, only a quarter of students are boys in the health and science program.  

Waipahu High School Principal Zachary Sheets said achieving gender equality in CTE is a top priority. He tries to make sure there’s equal gender representation in the presentations and promotional materials the school gives to students choosing their CTE programs and has added career tracks like kinesiology to try to make the health care program appealing to more boys. 

“Don’t limit yourself,” Sheets said he tells students. “If you really have a passion about it, we want you to pursue that.” 

Sheets is optimistic that efforts by feeder schools to provide career education to younger students will help close some gender gaps at the high school level.

An equal number of boys and girls are enrolled in classes such as woodworking and aquaponics at nearby Waikele Elementary, said Michelle Tavares-Yamada, the school’s academy pathway director.

Younger kids aren’t always aware of gender stereotypes around certain jobs, she said, and the school capitalizes on this by encouraging students to explore their interests.

“I think our students see that, so they don’t think about those gender inequities,” she said. 

With limited statewide guidance, some community groups and local employers are also stepping in to help schools close their gender gaps. 

Since 2018, the Chamber of Commerce Hawaii has led a pilot program targeting middle and high school girls who are interested in careers in STEM. The program, taking place in the Castle, Campbell and Waipahu complexes, connects schools with female leaders in the field and hosts activities and panels teaching girls about engineering at partner campuses. 

Kathleen Chu, who helps lead the initiative and works at the local engineering firm Bowers + Kubota, said young girls aren’t always aware that engineering is a high-paying career path. When talking to girls about their CTE options, she shares the challenges of working in a male-dominated field but also emphasizes that women can bring leadership skills and new perspectives to the job. 

“You can’t give up,” said Chu, adding that she doesn’t want girls to disregard a career in engineering because they struggle with math or haven’t seen many women at a construction site before. “You just have to keep trying.” 

In the three school complexes hosting the pilot program, the percentage of girls in engineering CTE programs has increased from 17% to 26% over the last five years. The Chamber of Commerce is trying to expand the program and identify new schools as future partners, said Lord Ryan Lizardo, vice president of education. 

Even with these partnerships and guest speakers, it’s still difficult to encourage students to pursue programs where they’ll be in the minority, said Tracie Koide, a teacher at Campbell High School. Teachers try to create welcoming environments for all students, regardless of their gender, she added, but many kids want to enroll in the same programs as their friends.

Looking Ahead

Hawaii has the opportunity to ramp up its efforts to achieve greater gender equality this year, as the state prepares to submit a new CTE plan to the federal government. 

The  offers few details on how schools will address gender gaps, but the public will have the opportunity to provide feedback on the document beginning next month.

For now, said UH research economist Rachel Inafuku, differences in career preparation for boys and girls can contribute to gender gaps already existing in the workplace. 

Nearly 80% of Hawaii’s elementary and middle school teachers are female and earn a median income of $63,000. Electrical engineers, 90% of whom are male, have a median income of more than $100,000. 

At the Chamber of Commerce, Lizardo said he’d like to see more professional development for teachers when it comes to helping students make informed decisions about CTE. It’s important for schools to be honest about gender inequalities in the workforce, he added, but students should also have as much information as possible when deciding what CTE programs to pursue so they’re not swayed by their families or friends.  

David Sun-Miyashiro, executive director of HawaiiKidsCAN, said the state should take a closer look at the way schools are marketing and administering CTE programs with clear differences in enrollment for boys and girls. CTE programs should open up new opportunities for students, he added, rather than confining them to the limited representation they currently see in the workforce.   

“I think we need to have those really honest and sometimes tough conversations,” he said. 

This story is a collaboration between  and , with support from Ascendium Education Group.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

He won one of 20 available slots in a new —  just one of three at Accenture — in a city of 20,000 public high school students. 

Three years later, Brown-Weaver, now 19, has become a full-time employee, earning more than $20 an hour as a package app developer at Accenture.

But a good friend who missed out on the apprenticeships is struggling. 

“Because of the luck of the draw that I had (I’m working) 
 in the field that I want to be in,” Brown-Weaver told a recent .

His friend, he said, “works part time at Target, making minimum wage.”

“It’s sad to see that I simply just got lucky that day,” Brown-Weaver said.

Providing high school students like Brown-Weaver a chance to try out possible careers has become a growing focus for families, public officials, schools and even businesses the last several years. 

But all work opportunities aren’t created equal. 

There’s a hierarchy of experiences that rise in commitment, intensity and benefit for students and providers —  with career days and job fairs at the low end. At the top end are internships, where students work with adults; and apprenticeships, longer programs where students are paid to work and earn career credentials.

Schools and communities routinely boast of making great efforts to better connect students with real work opportunities, but the reality is these efforts rarely go beyond career exposure events like career days or job shadows.

“The ultimate internship…a paid experience
we still have a long way to go to provide more opportunity for young people to experience those,” said Julie Lammers, senior vice president of American Student Assistance, a non-profit connecting students to career training.

The best estimates available suggest five percent of students or less have the chance for the gold standard of work experiences —  apprenticeships or internships. 

At the request of Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, the U.S. Department of Labor compiled data showing a little over 10,000 16- to 18-year-olds started apprenticeships nationally last year — less than a tenth of a percent of the more than 13 million students that age. That’s including 18-year-olds who started apprenticeships after graduating high school.

It’s a dramatic difference from European countries such as Switzerland, where more than half of students use apprenticeships to start a career or as a stepping stone to university. Apprenticeships in Switzerland have the attention of Linda McMahon, the new appointee for U.S. secretary of education, who on the day her appointment was announced. 

There are more internships than apprenticeships for high schoolers, but still not many. A 2018 survey of more than 800 students by American Student Assistance, a non-profit that works with students on career choices, showed while 79 percent were interested in trying a work experience, only 2 percent completed an internship in high school.

Though the percentage of employers offering high school internships has, ASA estimates only four to five percent of students actually are participating in internships.

‘That’s still a very small number of young people,” Lammers said. “Those organizations may only be offering one or two opportunities, so the volume is still not there.”

Lammers said schools are instead adding “things that expose young people to work, but are not necessarily training them in specific skills.”

ASA’s recent survey found that close to half of employers offer mentorships, job shadowing, open houses and field trip visits — all valuable experiences for students but that barely scratch the surface of providing  the skills and training needed for the world of work.

Noel Ginsburg, co-chairman of the U.S. Department of Labor’s said schools and businesses can’t stop at just exposing students to careers.

“It’s not a bad thing,” he said. “It’s just not enough.”

“It’s a lack of understanding what quality actually means when a school says, ‘We have these partnerships with XYZ company, and they come in, they’re helping us in class, and sometimes they’ll donate old whatever (equipment to train with),” Ginsburg said. “That’s not what apprenticeship is
but that’s historically what it has been for them.”

Experts have agreed on a rough hierarchy of work experiences for several years, often distinguishing between those where students “learn about work” and those where they “learn how to work.”

As a co-written by Advance CTE, the national association of state directors of career technical education, notes, “Work-based learning includes a continuum of experiences ranging from less intensive opportunities such as career awareness and career exploration to more intensive opportunities such as career preparation and career training.”

The Advance CTE hierarchy below is similar to those created in 2009 like, a Bay Area non-profit that has worked on career efforts in California and New York. It’s also similar to those used by nonprofits like Brookings, ExcelInED, ASA or adopted by states such as , , , or , sometimes labeling the top level as career immersion, development or participation.

Some take that hierarchy even farther. As officials in Indiana started developing plans for a statewide expansion of high school apprenticeships they ranked student work experiences with full registered apprenticeships at the top, pre-apprenticeships and other apprenticeships a level below, internships below those and work opportunities that teach students general employability skills a step lower.

The trouble is that while low-level career experiences like job fairs take just a few hours of time for students and businesses, apprenticeships and internships require much more effort from both sides. 

CityWorks DC, the program that organized Brown-Weaver’s apprenticeship, would like to expand to many more students, but is growing slowly.

“We definitely need more opportunities and hope to offer more, but one reason there are so few are the systemic barriers that make what we do very resource intensive and challenging,” said Lateefah Durant, CityWorks’ vice president of innovation.

She said it can be hard to find students that can commit to working several hours a week and fit that within their high school class schedules. It’s also hard to find companies willing to take on high school students and train them.

In 2019, the program’s first year, one of nine companies that took on apprentices backed out. And one of the other Accenture apprentices alongside Brown-Weaver had trouble meeting standards and was dropped.

ASA’s 2023 survey highlighted several common challenges businesses see as they start high school internships, including finding appropriate work for them, devoting staff to training them, scheduling around class schedules and whether students have transportation to work.

Companies are less likely to view high school apprenticeships as a key part of building a workforce than just as a way to give back to the community. Using apprenticeships and internships as a real talent strategy, as they are in Europe, is key to them ever becoming widely available, experts say.

Those findings are in keeping with challenges experts have pointed to as holding growth of internships and apprenticeships back.

Transportation is a big problem for lower-income students, who often need to improve their career chances the most but rarely have their own car. And class schedules, along with extracurricular activities, can be a big hurdle too since they can limit the time a student can spend in a workplace each day.

Indiana is among states trying to overcome these issues. Transportation costs could be covered by new Career Savings Accounts – state grants to students for training expenses. And the state is considering more flexible class schedules, so students can work at an apprenticeship a few days each week.

In many cases, with few companies stepping up to take on interns or apprenticeships, students are placed instead in government offices or with nonprofits that advocate for work opportunities. The D.C. program has apprentices with the Department of Labor and with New America, a left-leaning think tank that is part of the national Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship.

Indiana also placed early apprentices with Ascend Indiana, a non-profit that helped create them.

Schools and communities also lean on experiences that partly simulate or mirror work experience. These can include students doing exploratory summer internships with industry associations or schools that partner with companies so students earn money by doing a project, such as a small coding or marketing task, through school for the company.

Though there’s no consensus on where these fall on the continuum of work experiences, ASA’s Lammers said they can be worthwhile, if students are working on real-world problems for employers that intend to use the work product.

“If it is high- intensity project based learning, where young people are still exposed to a career
and are able to understand that it’s not just sort of an academic exercise
 there is huge value in that,” she said. “It might not just be the nine-to- five paid experience that we sort of see in an internship, and that might be okay.”

Others look to third parties that the field is calling “intermediaries” to navigate some of the complex legal, liability and training issues, as well as to recruit, select and train students, along with training company staff in how to work with teenagers.

In Boston, the city’s Public Industry Council helps run paid summer internships for high schoolers, while also running staff training sessions to make sure students and companies benefit. CareerWise acts as an intermediary on some levels. Genesys Works, a non-profit, fills that role in eight regions — Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Tulsa and Washington, D.C., with Jacksonville coming next year.

Genesys gives students eight-week of unpaid training in the summer after 11th grade before placing them in paid internships for 20 hours a week as seniors. Students are paid employees of Genesys, not the companies, but they work in the offices of companies like Accenture, Medtronic or Target, the latter in corporate offices, not stocking shelves or working a register like Brown-Weaver’s friend.

“We’re going to our corporate partners saying, like, what are the roles, entry level roles in your corporate offices that you are filling over and over again?” said Mandy Hildenbrand, chief services officer of Genesys. “Let’s talk about how we can be a pipeline for that.”

For many apprenticeship advocates, some of the barriers are more about attitudes than real problems. 

“Culturally, U.S. companies haven’t traditionally viewed themselves as a training ground or an extension of the classroom,” said Ginsburg, founder of CareerWise, the nation’s largest youth apprenticeship program. “There’s a big difference between having an intern look over your shoulder and actually expecting real work from an apprentice.”

He said businesses should recognize that while they won’t see immediate returns, they will if they are patient and take the time to train students well.

“It’s hard,” he said, “before it gets easy.”

But looks can be deceiving. Most weeks, this school sends students to work in high-rise offices, tech firms or a coding center it runs downtown.

In fact, the building’s past history as a neighborhood elementary school may be the only reminder of the big, comprehensive and often unsafe public high schools from which it’s often a refuge. 

Offering a dizzying array of internships, college courses and dual enrollment opportunities, Building 21 challenges nearly all of the conventional wisdom about what an urban public high school should do.

Unlike most urban high schools, Building 21 is small: Enrollment is capped at 400 students, with classes of just 25 or fewer.

It operates under a complex set of that stress the importance of relationships. When conflicts arise, teachers must help resolve them quickly, interfering as little as possible as students work things out. The school was among the first in Philadelphia to introduce so-called , an alternative to traditional — often harsh — school discipline. Instead of a lecture or suspension for misbehavior, students often find themselves deep in conversation about what happened, talking with teachers, counselors and classmates to get to the bottom of a conflict and resolve it. These practices, the school maintains, also teach problem-solving skills.

In operation for a decade, it also boasts something most Philadelphia schools don’t: a 94% graduation rate for the past two years. At last count, the district’s four-year graduation rate .

Nabeehah Parker, a 20-year veteran of the district, came to Building 21 in 2022 to run its partnership program. Her goal, she said, was to make it a place where students can have the same opportunities as students at selective schools.

To that end, the school offers a veritable revolving door of experts coming in to teach classes and students heading out for face-time with employers.

It features the kinds of risk-taking and experiences often reserved for students in elite schools. Yet it admits virtually anyone, with open-enrollment policies that match those of the city’s big neighborhood high schools.

Principal Ben Koch started out as a Spanish teacher here, building its world language program around a concept called “.” Instead of memorizing vocabulary lists and conjugating verbs, students act out stories in the language they’re learning. The audience responds to the actors in a kind of interactive linguistic improv. 

“I saw that just take off,” he said. Students took more risks, retained more vocabulary and learned to speak in full sentences. 

Simultaneously, he organized a class trip to Costa Rica, where students hiked the rainforest, ziplined, helped repaint an elementary school and worked at an elder care center. 

Closer to home, students learn bioscience through a mobile program sponsored by the Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research and game design with a teacher who created a mobile app to help schools track inventory. In a cosmetology class, teacher Samantha Bromfield focuses on ensuring employable skills, believing that “everyone should know how to do a range of everything.”

The school’s open-admissions policy is a draw for many families, said Parker, the partnership coordinator. The opportunity for any student to attend, no matter their grades or behavioral record, is “something that parents are looking for.”

But it also means much of Building 21’s energy is spent getting students’ skills up to the level where they can reliably pursue their interests. 

That often takes the form of individualizing assignments and basically personalizing student performance levels. In an English class, all students are writing about topics they’re interested in, but one student may be tasked with writing a cogent essay based on a reading, while another may write one that does more with the reading, incorporating specific details or answering complex questions. 

“What we’re trying to find is that sweet spot where you’re not ignoring the truth of what ‘unfinished learning’ looks like in high school — and you want kids to find themselves and get engaged,” said co-founder Laura Shubilla.

If some of that isn’t sexy or new, she shrugs it off. A lot of what works in education, including systemic differentiated instruction, simply isn’t. “I would say probably we’re more intentional than innovative.” 

As a result, while the school gets a lot of visitors, it doesn’t often appear in the news. These days, one of the main things the school is known for in Philly — a district plagued with decrepit building conditions — is its three-month closure last spring after inspectors discovered . In May 2023, one day after it reopened, shut it down again, just hours after a big celebratory barbecue. 

“Four o’clock in the afternoon,” Shubilla recalled, “the ceiling fell in.”

A ‘backwards-mapped’ curriculum

The school offers four years of competency-based learning, in which mastering skills takes precedence over seat time. Since students progress at their own rate, each enjoys what amounts to an individualized education.

It turns the idea of grades on its head, offering students the opportunity to submit and re-submit work until it meets high standards. Assignments are graded on a 2- to 12- point scale. If a student hands in a writing assignment that’s adequate or only touches on a few competencies, it might earn an 8 or 9 or lower. If she wants to earn a 10 or 11, she can refer to a chart that lays out the skills associated with such a piece of writing: It must have a compelling hook and strong point of view, cite evidence and acknowledge other perspectives.

Earning a 10 or higher means it’s as good as something a college student — or at least a college-ready student — might produce.

“We did a lot of studying on what it takes to be successful in college and on a job,” said co-founder Chip Linehan, “and we sort of backwards-mapped from there.”

Hassan Durant, 17, a senior, said the curriculum is challenging but worth the effort. “It pushes us to think harder and more on a college-based level,” he said

Understanding how to move up the grading scale was difficult at first, but many students now welcome it.

“A lot of people that I know that feel like they should have scored higher go to the teachers and ask, ‘What can I revise? What can I work on? What can I fix and change to take this from an 8 and bring it up to at least a 10?’” Durant said.

After years of traditional learning and report cards, he said it was difficult to get his parents to understand the subtleties of competency.

He recalled telling his parents, “I’m not really failing, and I wouldn’t say I’m passing, but I am getting the work done and doing what I have to do so that I can pass.” 

Roots at Harvard, MIT

Co-founders Shubilla and Linehan created Building 21 after meeting at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 2011, where they studied with renowned scholar . 

Elmore pushed students to rethink everything. “His question was always, ‘Why does this thing called learning have to take place in this place called school?’” said Shubilla. If not, he would ask, what would you replace it with?

She and Linehan soon realized that they had similar answers: Both believed school should start with an “anchor learning site” connected to opportunities elsewhere.

So they designed a school that both brings in experts from outside and gently pushes students into workplaces. Linehan likes to think of it as making the school “as permeable as possible.” 

Elmore, who died in 2021, also pushed students to confront their biases. More broadly, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education urged teachers to confront bedrock views about their own authority and interact more patiently with students.

“Their saying was, ‘You can’t transform the sector until you transform yourself,’” Shubilla recalled.

Building 21 opened in 2014, and now operates two campuses, one here and another in nearby . Beyond that, its curriculum is open-sourced, readily accessible to other educators wanting to try their hand at competency-based learning. 

The school’s name is a sly nod to MIT’s fabled , which for 80 years served as coded shorthand for a center of innovation. After World War II, it became home to dozens of researchers and technologists, including MIT’s legendary , widely seen as the first group of computer hackers.

Mastering skills preoccupies much of the first two years here, but the final two take on a different cast, with juniors spending large chunks of the day connecting what they’re learning to their interests through internships and senior projects. 

Last spring, Durant, the senior, spent a lot of time downtown at , Building 21’s IT pathway program, to learn the Python computer language. He’s also in the middle of a paid “externship” with , an engineering software company that specializes in infrastructure. The company — one of 83 outside organizations that partner with the school — sponsors five such positions each spring and summer. 

Last fall, Durant was also enrolled in a public speaking class at La Salle University, one of three colleges where Building 21 students can sign up for dual-enrollment classes. Building 21 also runs three dual enrollment classes onsite through Harrisburg University.

Like many schools that emphasize project-based and competency-based learning, it puts seniors through “capstone” projects that often summarize their learning, scratch an itch or answer a nagging question.

In one case, a student who wanted to start a theater program visited stages at nearby schools and returned to Building 21 with a detailed proposal to create a homegrown initiative, complete with budget, staffing projections and recommendations.

Another surveyed the African-American history curriculum and came away with a keen observation: When it came to Black Americans, it relied heavily on “the oppression narrative” of slavery, racism and subjugation, Shubilla recalled. “And her question was: ‘Why is there not more Black joy in the curriculum?’” 

Not only did teachers listen, they spent the following summer staring down the student’s complaint and eventually concluded that she was right. They redesigned it. 

One teacher that teaching about racial trauma opens a wound for many students of color that teachers often fail to consider. So the school added more readings and projects built around “enlightenment and empowerment,” such as a study of the crusading journalist and others.

Taken together, the experiences resonate with students, who mature quickly as they approach graduation.

Aaliyah St. Fleur, 18, a senior, admitted that she wasn’t really focused on the big picture until last fall, when she met a group of Black women doctors from the University of Pennsylvania Children’s Hospital at a medical conference. She now wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse — or perhaps a gynecologist.

More importantly, she realized that if she wants to be a doctor, she has to get serious about school. 

“I was on my grades, but iffy about it,” she admitted. “But then once I did the trip, I was like, ‘OK, my GPA has to be higher.’”

Most schools might not sympathize with a student realizing in the spring of her junior year that she must focus to get into medical school, let alone college. But Parker, Shubilla and others said she’s got time to begin building a transcript that will help get her there. Likely it will take a big investment in dual-enrollment classes come this fall, when she begins her senior year. 

No one understands that better than Aaliyah, who knows that her time in high school is short. “I’m actually paying attention.”

Spending at least four hours every week at the pet hospital, Sylvia’s internship is an ideal example of how the charter school’s mandatory award-winning Firehawks Internship and Real-World Experience (FIRE) program can work.

Along with about 110 other juniors and seniors — who helped with office jobs in insurance, child care, construction or social services — Sylvia did more than just clean cages and feed animals at Keystone Pet Hospital. She quickly learned how to meet with families and give dogs and cats basic physical exams and shots.

“It was incredible,” said Sylvia, who is interning with the pet hospital again as a senior and hopes to work there full time after attending Purdue University. “I got to put myself into the vet’s shoes.”

Victory’s program is a leader in Indiana in connecting high school students to workplace experiences, even for a state that’s made work-based learning a priority in recent years and hopes to transform high school by making it a centerpiece of student’s high school experience. The Indiana Department of Education gave Victory and the program one of three Excellence in Student Pathways awards last fall.

Now in its fifth year, the program places students each spring with three dozen businesses and nonprofits as part of their regular school week, busing them to workplaces when needed.

“What sets us apart here is this is compulsory for 11th, and 12th graders,” said Andrew Hayenga, the school’s chief development officer. “It’s not reserved for the top 10% of kids. It’s not reserved for the kids who may want to go into a trade. We’re trying to open the possibilities up to every student in 11th and 12th grade.”

Rahul Jyoti, the school’s readiness director, said many schools might balk at giving up class time for 11 Fridays out of a 40-week school year to career exposure, often out of worry that students’ test scores in math and English might suffer.

But Victory considers it a crucial part of students’ education, particularly those who are low-income; and whose parents don’t have connections in high-paying fields. Jyoti said many students were graduating without knowing what careers they could seek or chose majors in college that weren’t leading to good fits for them, so the school needed to step in and help.

“We know the academics are important, but we realized that no matter how strong their academics are, if they don’t have that networking, professional experience and the soft skills, they are not able to be truly ready to go to college and truly ready to grow into a career,” Jyoti said. “Taking away those days throughout the year actually helps them to be more prepared on all the other school days.”

“We ended up having our juniors and seniors be the most professional students, being more successful in college, and being really engaged in presenting themselves after they graduate because they’ve had so many of these experiences,” he added.

Businesses and nonprofits have stepped up to take on student interns, with many participating in the program year after year.

Chad Miller, managing director of Miller Insurance Group, said his small business couldn’t take on a full-time intern, but Victory organizes the program, has students go to businesses for a reasonable amount of time and even gives employers a guide on how to help students.

“This is a commitment that I feel like I and my team can bite off and it’s sustainable for us and hopefully provides a value to them,” Miller said. 

Shamika Buchanan, owner of Intelligent Minds Child Development, said interns at her daycare center “have been amazing.” She tries to have students learn both about child care and how to run the business.

“They’ve learned a lot,” Buchanan told other businesses as the program launched for the year in the fall, “We’ve grown together. I’ve even employed some over the summer to come and work for my childcare.”

The pet hospital has also asked Sylvia to fill in for absent employees outside of her internship.

“Our relationship has grown incredibly strong,” she said. “They always rely on me for multiple things, so I’m excited to be part of their group.”

Victory can’t always find such perfect matches for students, Jyoti admits, since there are a limited number of employers volunteering for the program. So the school tries to find close or related matches, and stresses that time in any workplace develops skills students can use anywhere.

“I tell the students, you are not necessarily learning about the field you’re interested in, but it’s still a really valuable experience,” Jyoti said. “Being successful in any field requires skills in a professional way that you’re going to learn. And most of our partners are small business owners that have a lot of different areas and functions in their business. So students, even if they are not 100% sure of what they want to do, can find something to be engaged with at their site.”

Senior Devin Stewart, who will attend Purdue University to pursue a career in cybersecurity and information technology, is one of those students who did not have a direct match to his career plans. After interning with a public relations firm as a junior, he’s interning with a community development and affordable housing nonprofit as a senior.

But he doesn’t mind because he’s learning how businesses work.

“I think it’s gonna be valuable for me,” he said. “My mom has always had an idea for me to start a business on my own, so with business development, and things of that nature, it’ll help me have the skills that I need to potentially start a business if I want.”

Repeatedly , the state legislature ordered Indianapolis education officials to rethink the mission of high schools. 

Current graduation requirements will be thrown out next year and new ones calling for more career preparation will take their place.

“Are the four years of high school as valuable as possible for students?” state education secretary Katie Jenner asked in an interview with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “I’ve yet to meet a person who said, ‘Yes, they are.’ Most people say … if high school looked different for students, then we could better connect them to what’s what’s next.”

“If that’s the case, then what barriers do we need to get out of the way?” she continued. “How can we transform it in order to make it better for students.” 

Jenner said having students spend time in workplaces to see what careers fit them, or earning career credentials, will help both students and businesses.

“That’s really what we’re trying to think through in Indiana, to not only better support Indiana students, but to also be mindful of Indiana’s talent pipeline,” Jenner said.

Republican State Rep. Chuck Goodrich, who helped lead the charge earlier this year to create a key piece of the new focus — $5,000 Career Scholarship Accounts that sophomores, juniors and seniors can use for career training — said students need better opportunities to gain skills.

“Giving students hands-on applied learning opportunities and the ability to earn a credential before graduation is a game changer, not only for the student, not only for the family, but for Indiana,” Goodrich told the state Senate this spring. 

Indiana already has a requirement students show “demonstrable employability skills” to graduate from high school, but it currently counts playing on a school team, other extracurricular activities, community service, an after-school job or a capstone research project the same as doing an internship or apprenticeship.

The new requirements will be more work and skills-focused.

The Career Scholarship Accounts are an early piece of the overhaul the legislature passed this spring in House Bill 1002. The bill contains another immediate change — requiring schools to teach students more this upcoming academic year about career planning, available training programs, scholarships, and different jobs available, “with an emphasis on high wage, high demand industry,” according to the new law. 

Major parts of the overhaul, particularly which career preparation steps should be required to graduate and which just encouraged, are still to be determined.

The Indiana education department is holding focus groups with parents, educators and businesses about how to shape the new vision and should have proposals for the state board to discuss early next year. New graduation requirements will be set by the end of 2024, Jenner said, to kick in for the class of 2029.

Among the key items being discussed:

• A greater emphasis on students’ job shadowing, internships and apprenticeships that only “a tiny percentage” of students experience now, according to Jenner.
• Changing the courses required to graduate.
• Requiring more meeting time with career counselors or businesses
• Requiring students to earn credentials for careers before graduating.
• Piloting “mastery” approaches to measuring student progress, throwing out traditional A-F grades, replacing them with tracking student progress toward their mastery or competency of skills. Workplace skills like teamwork and critical thinking would be measured, not just core subjects like English and math.

The efforts are attracting some national attention. Patricia Levesque, CEO of the Excellence In Education Foundation, visited Indianapolis this fall to praise the state for being a national leader in preparing students for careers, not just college.

Though Indiana is better than other states in helping students earn credentials, she warned too many students are being guided to many credentials businesses aren’t seeking.

“Nearly 60 to 70 percent of the credentials earned by high school students that year had no value,” she said of Indiana. “No company was asking for those credentials, right? Students were earning something that didn’t have currency in the marketplace.”

Some legislators say they are concerned the overhaul is more an attempt to help businesses find employees than help students.

“This rethinking, reimagining of high school is our attempt at filling these jobs to me,” said Democratic State Sen. Shelli Yoder before voting against House Bill 1002. “We’re doing a disservice for students. And that’s not to say we don’t need to reimagine it … It’s going to help the workforce. But is it helping students?”

Schools, like Victory College Prep high school in Indianapolis, are already on board with the main idea of the change. That school has placed every 11th and 12th grader in internships with companies or nonprofits for 10 school days a year the last five years, other than some pandemic adjustments.

“We really believe here that graduation is not the end goal for our students,” said Rahul Jyoti, the school’s chief readiness officer. “We don’t want them to celebrate and say, ‘Hey, I graduated. This is great’. Because then real life hits you, especially for a lot of our students that come from the underserved communities, here in Indianapolis, and so really, this is the starting point.”

Jyoti said his school has been able to find 25 and 40 employers a year to host students, but wonders what will happen if every school in the state tries to find similar opportunities for every student.

Jenner said connecting with enough employers willing to take on the work of running internships or apprenticeships will be a challenge. 

“One of the threats is that we transform the high school diploma and
readiness for Work Based Learning … and there aren’t there aren’t enough spots for kids,” she said.

Solving that issue is a big part of her work this fall and was a key reason the state sent delegations to Switzerland, where school and business cooperation on apprenticeships is a part of the culture. She said work based learning experiences may need to be different for different industries and may have to evolve over time, but the state has to start somewhere.

“We’re getting after it because we have to and we must for kids,” she said. “We’re going to learn some lessons along the way and we’re gonna keep getting better from there. But we can’t wait to get started. We have to go. We have to try some things.”

Eighty-nine Connecticut school districts will receive thousands of dollars of additional funding to expand their dual credit programs, which offer students both high school and college credit, state officials announced Tuesday morning.

“I think what we’re trying to do with these dual [credit programs], or trying to do with internships, and what we’re trying to do with apprentice programs 
 is we’re trying to make education real and give it a sense of purpose for young people,” Gov. Ned Lamont said. “[These courses can] give a sneak preview of what happens next, in terms of confidence and sense of direction.”

About $3.8 million  among the chosen districts, with most of the funding designated to those that serve high percentages of students of color, including Bridgeport, Danbury, East Hartford, Hartford, New Haven, Norwalk, Waterbury and CREC Magnet Schools, which received $90,000 grants each.

“It’s really about increasing access for all students. I think there are clearly disproportionalities in terms of students of color and students from low-income families, so our grant program that we have launched now is focused explicitly on not just increasing participation but losing those disparities as well,” said Ajit Gopalakrishnan, the chief performance officer for the state’s Department of Education. “The grant program helps with defraying district planning costs and works with institutional direct partners to make the work happen. 
 Long term, we do need to think about, as a state, supporting the costs involved, even though the costs are minimal for some families.”

Earlier this year, the CT Mirror reported how students of color were being , another type of class that offers college credit if students pass a test at the end of the year. Experts, who said the disparities are often exacerbated in the same classroom or school because of school climate or systemic structures, also said college-level classes could become more equitable by shifting from AP into more dual-credit classes.

Three students interviewed at the time, all recent graduates of Wilby High School in Waterbury, said they weren’t offered dual credit courses at their school.

On Tuesday, Gopalakrishnan said “almost all” high schools “have some availability” of dual-credit courses through partnerships among the education department, individual high schools and UConn and CT State, but was unable to immediately answer how many didn’t offer these classes. 

At least 17 schools have suppressed data on the number of students who earned at least three college credits through dual enrollment during the 2022-23 school year, according to state data. Data is typically suppressed for confidentiality reasons because the number of students participating is low. 

Wilby was one of those schools. 

Other high schools like New Milford High only had seven of 602 upperclassmen, or 1.2%, obtaining at least three college credits through dual-enrollment.

Some schools in districts that are expected to receive funding like Danbury High School, Hartford Public High School and Brien McMahon High School in Norwalk reported under 10% of students were receiving college credit through dual-enrollment. 

Meanwhile, in other districts, like Colchester, Weston and Westport, the rate is around 82%.

In Ansonia, where about 40% of the high school’s upperclassmen earned three college credits or more, Superintendent Joseph DiBacco attested to the impact of those courses.

“Just last year, the senior class at Ansonia High School had 900 university credits they acquired,” DiBacco said at the state’s press conference Tuesday.

DiBacco was joined by two students, both of whom said they began taking these courses when they were underclassmen.

“I feel really prepared for college, and I really think that gave me a step forward,” said Paul Palmer, a senior at the high school. “It also saves a lot of money, and that’s my main focus. 
 I wouldn’t be able to do that without all of these partnerships.”

The state said grant funds are expected to be used mainly for:

• Stipends for high school teachers and college faculty to create course work that lines up with college expectations;

• Tuition reimbursement for high school teachers who need to complete additional training to teach these courses;

• Purchasing additional equipment for fields like health care, technology, etc.;

• Developing strategies to engage more students and explain “the benefits of earning college credit,” including saving money and skipping general education courses.

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The programs, in which students are promised free college tuition if they graduate high school, have long been considered a silver bullet against the soaring tuition and loan debt blocking many young people, particularly those who are low-income, from earning degrees and finding fulfilling careers.

But in the last few years, college promise programs from Kalamazoo to New Haven, Buffalo, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, have realized that paying tuition alone doesn’t always achieve the ultimate goal of making lives better. So they have added staff and built partnerships with business to start internship, mentorship and apprentice programs that give “promise scholars” a start on career paths.

Further highlighting the shift, college promise advocates nationally will hold their fourth Nov. 8 and 9 at the University of Tennessee. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and First Lady Jill Biden will speak at the event, whose major topics include “Empowering Career Exploration and Pathway Discovery” and “Building the Promise Pipeline of Workers.”

“We’re quick to say ‘Go to college, get your degree,’ but you don’t have that follow up piece of what do you do after that?” said Jade Scott, who works with the Detroit Promise through the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “So many students get lost in the shuffle, like ‘I’m done with my degree, what do I do now? And this is where we really come in.”

“Now, we’re talking about how we get them employed,” Scott added. “What are we doing to support you, as you make that journey from these college classes into an actual career that you genuinely enjoy, or that’s making you money, or that’s offering you a sustaining lifestyle?” 

Detroit Promise, with the help of the chamber, gave 450 students work experiences such as internships or job shadowing in the 2022-23 school year, Scott said.

The Kalamazoo Promise, perhaps the best-known promise program in the nation, considers the internship program it launched in 2022 so important it calls it “Higher Promise.” 

Cetera DiGiovanni, Higher Promise coordinator, said parents previously kept asking if Promise officials knew of open jobs while businesses repeatedly asked the program for help finding talent.

“We know that kids are graduating and no one has jobs,” DiGiovanni said. “We thought we would be the mediator to bring them together.”

David Rust, executive director of Say Yes Buffalo, said the evolution is natural. Say Yes Buffalo, which started as a scholarship program in 2011, placed 25 students in apprenticeships in the fall of 2022 and another 25 this year.

“It stands to reason that there will be refinements, expansion of features, because we know a lot more now about what scholars and students need,” he said.

College promise programs began in the 1990s with individual philanthropists adopting single schools and pledging to cover college tuition for any student that graduated from high school and enrolled in college. Anonymous donors in Kalamazoo started a citywide promise program in 2005, then other promise programs like Say Yes to Education expanded from single schools in the 1990s to the cities of Syracuse and Buffalo, New York, Greensboro County, North Carolina, and finally Cleveland in 2019.

States like Tennessee have also added statewide promise programs as the ranks have swelled to more than 400 programs nationally. The programs differ in what colleges they pay for, with some covering only the local community college, some only in-state public colleges and others including private universities that choose to be partners with them.

But once lauded for wiping out the worries of tuition debt, promise programs have found that students, particularly low-income students, also need chances to test drive careers they think they might like. They need mentors in their field. They need workplace experience before graduating and seeking a full-time job.

Sometimes students simply need a paycheck while they are in school to pay for rent, commuting to class and meals, which promise programs rarely cover. Or they skip college altogether because class time takes away earning time they need to help their families.

“Free college can be too expensive for students,” said Rust. “A lot of our scholars, over 50 percent, have combined family income below $40,000. So, we’ve seen this more so than ever throughout the pandemic, you (students) do what you have to do, not necessarily what you want to do.”

There’s also benefit to the regional economy when students find careers that keep them in the city after college. 

In Columbus, Ohio, where a pilot promise program pays for Columbus school district graduates to attend Columbus State Community College, companies such as Nationwide Insurance and gas and electricity supplier IGS Energy are eager to take on promise students in college as paid interns.

John Wharton, 19, a second year finance student at Columbus State, started work at IGS this fall helping manage and audit customer accounts for $18 an hour. Because he has an interest in marketing too, his supervisors are also trying to find chances to work in that department.

“It gives you a sense of feeling for what the real world is,” said Wharton, who had never had a job before the internship. “This gives people a platform to gain insight, whether or not they actually want to do what they’re studying.”

Abdallahi Thiaw, 20, also a Columbus Promise student, also just started as an intern this fall with the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio for $20 an hour for 20 hours a week. Since he is earning an associates degree in interactive media, developing apps and programs that can be used on mobile devices, the board has him developing a chat program for its website that lets users find out what services the nonprofit provides.

“It’s a big opportunity for students like me, because a lot of job fields will tell you that once you graduate, you need experience,” said Thiaw. “But the main issue is nobody’s offering experience, so how are you going to get that experience? But with this program, it offers students like me experience and on top of that, you get paid great wages, which really helps us in focusing on school.”

David Campbell, director of communications for the board, said matching students with work that fits their interest, like is happening with Thiaw, is ideal.

“That idea is the genesis of this program, that they need to work, they need to have some money, but it needs to be earned and still learn, right?” Campbell said. “It has to combine with their degree, so they get someplace at the end of it.”

English Classical and its imitators proudly proclaimed their ability to prepare students for new jobs in emerging, high-tech industries such as banking, manufacturing and railroads. 

It’s just over 200 years later, and high schools have opened their doors to all teens, not just boys. But with technological disruptions daily changing our conception of what a well-educated young person looks like, Americans are again clamoring for innovative secondary schools that help them make sense of these changes. They’re looking, above all, for institutions that leave behind many of the traditions of the past in favor of offerings that promise to help their kids get a strong start. 

Since last spring, journalists at Âé¶čŸ«Æ· have been crossing the U.S. as part of our 2023 High School Road Trip. It has embraced both emerging and established high school models, taking us to 13 schools from Rhode Island to California, Arizona to South Carolina, and in between. 

It has brought us face-to-face with innovation, with programs that promote everything from nursing to aerospace to maritime-themed careers.

At each school, educators seem to be asking one key question: What if we could start over and try something totally new?

What we’ve found represents just a small sample of the incredible diversity that U.S. high schools now offer, but we’re noticing a few striking similarities that educators in these schools, free to experiment with new models, now share. Here are the top eight:

1

They don’t worry about what came before.

In these places, high school looks almost nothing like it did for our parents or grandparents. 

While the seven-period, books-in-a-locker high school, with its comprehensive curriculum, vast extracurriculars and Friday night football games is alive and well and available to most of the nation’s 17 million or so high schoolers, it is no longer the default model. 

Instead, thousands of young people now attend high school each morning in facilities that more closely resemble workplaces, professional training grounds and research labs. Quite often, young people are in actual workplaces for part of their school day, either as apprentices or taking part in something resembling career tourism, trying out jobs to see what fires their imaginations and fits their tastes.

2

They focus intently on exactly what their students need.

Most of these schools are small by design, so the traditional mission of serving thousands of students with countless courses — as well as the requisite menu of after-school activities, such as sports, music, and drama — is out of the question. 

In its place, many new schools now offer one key thing: focus. Intense, unrelenting focus.

At Rhode Island Nurses Institute Middle College in Providence, R.I., students show up for class each morning dressed in scrubs. They spend four years learning the bedrock values and basic skills of the nursing profession, earning college credit before they graduate.

The school’s laser-like focus is perhaps its greatest strength, said Principal Tammy Ferland, a veteran educator. “This is a health care program, a nursing program,” she said. “If you don’t want to be a nurse, if you don’t want to be in health care, then you don’t belong here.”

Students can still play sports or perform in the band — they just need to find those things at their neighborhood school or elsewhere —after they remove their scrubs.

The same focus is on display at Urban Assembly New York Harbor School on Governors Island, a ferry ride south of Manhattan, where the East River meets the Hudson. Students must choose among eight maritime-themed career and technical education pathways before they close out their freshman year. 

Clad in life vests, protective goggles and welders’ masks, students get a chance to earn industry certifications in marine science or technology before graduation — bona fides that help them enter the workforce or pursue further education. 

Most of its students come to the program with an interest in marine biology research, environmental science and aquaculture. And while many pursue these fields, others migrate to ocean engineering, professional diving and even vessel operations. 

3

They embrace internships and personalization.

Many of these new high school models focus less on one industry than on imparting what students need to know about the modern workplace more broadly, through intensive, often personalized, coursework and professional internships. 

At Blue Valley Center for Advanced Professional Studies in Overland Park, KS, students spend about three hours a day working with professionals in one of six industries, from food science to aerospace engineering. 

Housed in a light-filled, three story building that more closely resembles a high-tech office, the program enjoys support from the local school district, which created it as a half-day program that serves only juniors and seniors. 

Students return to their neighborhood high school for required coursework. For accreditation purposes, the district treats the entire enterprise as a class.

“Blue Valley CAPS treated me like a working adult,” said alumna Sophia Porter, who now holds dual degrees in physics and applied mathematics and statistics from Johns Hopkins University and serves as a project manager and test operator for BE-4 engines at the Texas aerospace company Blue Origin.

At The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center in Providence, students spend much of what would typically be class time working on personalized projects prescribed by advisors, who follow small groups of just 16 students throughout their high school career, intimately learning about their interests and academic needs. Students also spend much of their four-year career in a series of bespoke internships at local businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions. 

Founded in 1996, The Met is renowned among a brand of progressive educators seeking to create small, personalized high schools around students’ passions and interests. “That’s what the Met taught me,” said Jordan Maddox, class of 2007. “Don’t really limit yourself.”

Maddox admits he initially didn’t quite know what to make of the place. “I remember telling my mother, ‘Mom, this is a daycare for high school students.’ And she was like, ‘Give it a chance. Give it time.’”

These schools also offer a kind of freedom and agency to students that would have been unheard of to their parents.

At One Stone, a tiny private high school near downtown Boise, Idaho, students are deputized to run much of the operation, serving as officers of the board and filling two-thirds of board positions overall.

“A lot of people don’t believe that high school students can do meaningful, big things,” said Teresa Poppen, One Stone’s executive director and co-founder. “And I have always believed that they can do meaningful things when empowered and trusted.”

Or, as recent graduate Abella Cathey put it, “Being treated like an adult is what makes you act like one.”

4

They prepare young people for jobs in emerging industries.

Just as the first public high school offered to educate young people to compete in the high-tech industries of the era, the new breed of high school offers the same promise, only in medicine, aerospace and tech-assisted agriculture.

In Lodi, Calif., as the number of wineries begins to match its status as a major grape-growing powerhouse, the nonprofit San Joaquin A+ has partnered with the Lodi Unified School District and others to create an internship pipeline that gives students real-life learning and experiences across a variety of roles in the winemaking industry.

The partnership turns rural wineries into state-of-the-art classrooms where students spend time inspecting vines, cleaning storage tanks with pressure washers, and setting up tasting. In the end, they learn about the whole business: growing grapes, making wine and selling it.

Across the country, at Anderson Institute of Technology in western South Carolina, students from three districts now get real-world experience early on in their educational careers in preparation for jobs at companies like Bosch, Michelin and Arthrex.

Much like the Blue Valley model, students take core classes at their home high schools, and then commute to AIT to take classes like aeronautics, auto shop, and medicine. They work both in traditional classrooms and “labs” that mimic real-world work environments — an automotive garage, aerospace engineering lab or a surgery room.

“It’s all about giving kids a purpose in life,” said Don Herriott, a local business owner. 

5

They’re rethinking what classrooms, campuses and school days look like.

In many new schools, such personalization takes place among new campus facilities, but in others, students navigate between several physical and virtual sites to attend class — sometimes all in the same day.

In Arizona, the 86 students who attend Phoenix Union City High School choose from a menu of some 500 options that include coursework at the district’s brick-and-mortar schools, its online-only program, internships, jobs, college classes or career training programs.

“The pandemic gave us an entree,” said Chad Gestson, until recently the system’s superintendent. “It enabled us to go to a system with no limits.”

Phoenix Union now operates four small high schools with specific themes, including law enforcement, firefighting, coding and cybersecurity. This fall, Phoenix Educator Preparatory welcomed its first students. It also operates standalone “microschools” housed in existing high schools — they include a program aimed at students working toward admission to highly selective colleges. 

6

They redefine who high school is for.

Just as many schools now redefine what kind of space a high school should occupy, others are rethinking their customer base.

At Roybal Learning Center’s new film and television production magnet high school in Los Angeles, show business industry professionals last fall put up millions to launch a program to give Black, Hispanic and Asian students a pathway into good-paying jobs in the movie industry, helping them become “part of the machinery of storytelling,” said Bryan Lourd, an executive at Creative Artists Agency and the agent of actor George Clooney, a key supporter. 

The school plans to match students with mentors in the industry and eventually develop an apprenticeship program to offer early experience in their chosen field. The goal, said Deborah Marcus, who manages education efforts at Creative Artists Agency, is for graduates to not only land their first job on a crew, but their second and third as well.

7

They serve students of color in a more supportive way.

At New York’s Brooklyn Lab School, social workers visited nearly 100 homes to find students as absenteeism soared after the Covid pandemic.

More than three years later, each Lab School student now has a personal advocate, an advisor who starts each day with a non-academic meeting to build relationships and discuss health or current events over free breakfast.

Two teachers now lead each class, at least one of whom is special education certified, as the school adopts an all-inclusion-model. 

Morning office hours and a six-week night school offer more chances for students to bridge academic gaps made worse by the pandemic. And teachers are paid to lead and attend professional development sessions. Roughly 80% are Black or brown, serving about 450 students who are predominantly Black, Latino and low-income. 

“When you’re a school of this size, you have the ability to respond and cater to the community that you’re serving, and be more personable with the families that you meet, the people that you work with, and the staff that you hire,” said assistant principal Melissa Poux.

8

They cut through traditional structures to find what works.

Perhaps most significantly, many high school programs are finding new ways to serve at-risk students.

For many, what they need most is more time to grow. At New York City’s Math, Engineering, and Science Academy Charter High School, recent graduates are paid $500 to participate in a six-week “13th grade” Alumni Lab that offers resume writing, interview support and sessions exploring growth mindset, self-awareness and making goals — skills that help young people, particularly alumni of color, work through feelings of inadequacy, shame, or feeling like an imposter. 

“Life has not gone as they were led to believe it would,” said MESA’s co-executive director and co-founder Arthur Samuels. “
You have all of these kids who are not tethered to any institution, but the institution that they are tethered to is their high school. We need to leverage that relationship.” 

The program last spring wrapped up its third cohort, with 71% of participants matriculating back to college or into a free workforce development program.

Schools, Samuels said, “create this artificial bright line that happens on the day of graduation: June 23, you’re our kid. June 24, we give you a diploma and you’re someone else’s problem.” 

At Goodwill Excel Center Adult Charter High School in Washington, D.C., part of a network of Goodwill schools for adult learners nationwide, educators have compressed the traditional 20-week semester into a rolling series of eight-week terms. Coursework is based on competency, not seat time, and four assessments over the course of each term keep students on track.

But those who don’t succeed, even with individualized tutoring, can simply start over again at the end of eight weeks. Students with heavy work or family commitments can stay enrolled by taking just one class per term.

“We like to put high school dropouts into a box and say, ‘This is why they’re a dropout,’” said Excel’s Executive Director, Chelsea Kirk. “But we don’t ever think about what structures caused that. We don’t ever think about ‘How could a school change its structures to embrace people?”

— James Fields, Beth Hawkins, Linda Jacobson, Marianna McMurdock and Jo Napolitano contributed to this report.

]]> /article/filling-the-gap-internship-pays-texas-teens-to-learn-sex-ed/ Sat, 16 Sep 2023 12:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=714763 This article was originally published in

Angelique Estrada, who uses they/them pronouns, remembered the single health class she took in middle school that only briefly mentioned sex education.

“It wasn’t really about sex ed, it was just about getting your period,” the 18-year-old recalled. “That’s really all I had in school.”

Paola Duran, 19, shared a similar experience during her freshman year in high school.

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“I took a health class, and that was basically all the sex ed that I really knew,” Duran said. “Growing up in a Hispanic household you don’t really hear much about sex, except don’t do it.”

Tales of limited sex education are nothing new for Texas as one of 18 states that do not require it to graduate high school. Instead, students in Texas take a health class in middle school, which includes lessons on puberty, abuse prevention and sexually transmitted diseases.

Though some school districts, including the Socorro Independent School District, work with local health organizations to expand their sex ed curriculum, the majority of Texas students learn from a

That changed for Estrada and Duran when the teens became interns with the Fronterizx Community Project, or FCP, where they learned about sex education and participated in projects to share their knowledge with their peers.

Interns are paid $15 an hour to attend workshops, create online content and give presentations on sex education throughout the borderland. The organization also pays students a $50 “self care” and travel stipends.

“There is just so clearly a gap in the school system and students crave the information and want to talk about it,” said FCP program coordinator Corinthia Fraire. “Our goal is to fill in that gap in a way that is welcoming to young people and to create a space for them to be able to have different discussions.”

Data shows that gap exists throughout Texas.

It is estimated that just under 17% of schools in the state offer abstinence-plus sex education — also known as comprehensive sex education — which focuses on teaching medically accurate information about contraception, according to a 2017  Just over 58% of schools in the state offer abstinence-only sex education classes and about 25% do not offer it at all, according to the study.

Schools that do offer sex education must stress abstinence as the preferred birth control method for unmarried young people. Schools are also required to provide parents with access to their health and sex ed curriculum and can also opt their child out of any part of the lesson.

FCP coordinator and former intern, Angelica Bustos said that many schools that do offer sex education still fail to address the needs of LGBTQ students and those who are already sexually active.

“They don’t have anybody to ask questions to because their teachers don’t always have the opportunity to answer those questions freely without getting in trouble,” Bustos said. “Then they go home and they can’t ask those questions because they don’t quite feel comfortable asking their parents.”

As part of FCP, interns learn about topics you would expect to find in any comprehensive sex ed class, like contraception and teen pregnancy, but also get to have discussions that may be considered taboo at home or in school, like gender identity, masturbation and pleasure. Other times they talk about social issues like birth control accessibility and teen mental health.

Duran, who took part in the program in 2021, said she learned about the stigma minority women and non-binary people face when talking about sex.

“I just learned that it’s important to have conversations and it’s important to destigmatize a lot of these topics,” she said.

Estrada, who was an intern in 2022, said students also learned about condoms, consent and the importance of communication.

FCP is funded by the , a non-profit that offers financial assistance to patients seeking abortion care in El Paso, Juarez and Southern New Mexico. The fund paused its services in June 2022 after the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe V. Wade.

Since FCP was founded in 2018, dozens of high school students have taken part in the various iterations of the program.

Initially, the organization aimed to address unwanted teen pregnancies by trying to change local school policies and improving access to sex education.

“If we were to update any policies, we would need to directly hear from the people who are being impacted, which is young people,” Fraire said.

The first cohort of interns was hired to give presentations on teen birth rates and the impacts of teen pregnancy at local School Health Advisory Council — or SHAC — meetings. These councils are made of members from the community and are meant to give school districts guidance on their health education and sex ed curriculum.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and FCP interns were no longer able to attend SHAC meetings, they began giving virtual presentations to school boards, holding townhalls and gathering signatures for a petition to try to improve access to sex education in El Paso schools.

Though their efforts failed, Fraire said the group was able to learn from the experience and began changing their goals.

“Some of the feedback we got from the youth was that they would receive their sex education as pamphlets or like notebooks without any type of lecture and was more self guided and optional,” Fraire said. “Knowing the long journey it would take to change school policies, we decided to take matters into our own hands and focus on curating a curriculum and teaching different topics ourselves.”

To take part in the internship students must get their parent’s permission and sign an agreement ensuring they understand what type of conversations their kids will be having. Fraire said parents are also invited to attend and listen in on discussions and activities.

For now, Fraire said FCP is limited to hiring six to eight interns a year but hopes to grow the organization to be able to offer in-depth sex education internships to more El Paso teens.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

]]> /article/innovative-high-schools-the-met/ Wed, 16 Aug 2023 10:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=710200 Providence

After weeks working side-by-side in a tiny nut-free bakery, Susan Lagasse and her young apprentice reached what was perhaps their most fraught lesson: the scourge of cake crumbs in buttercream frosting.

“Once you have a little crumb, it spreads throughout the entire cake,” said Lagasse. “It’s like a disease.”

The apprentice, 17-year-old Caroline Bonga, nodded in agreement. For the past several weeks, she’d been spending a lot of her time on crumb control at Lagasse’s bakery, Awesome Sweets, covering naked cakes with a base layer of frosting prior to decoration. 

Across the small table sat Lillian John, who gently guided the conversation back to a key question: How can we end this internship with a bang?

John is an adviser at The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a legendary public high school universally known as The Met. For more than a quarter of a century, Met advisers have been sitting in on meetings like these, transforming work-focused internships and student-driven exhibitions into a coherent education for some of the state’s neediest students.

Originally housed in space shared with the University of Rhode Island, in 2002 The Met opened in its current configuration in the Upper South Side, Providence’s poorest neighborhood. Built on the site of abandoned housing, next to a former hospital, the school sits on a wide-open swath of green with four small schools, each in a corner of campus.

The size is intentional: Each school houses fewer than 150 students, in core groups of 14 to 18, led by a single adviser like John who guides them from freshman to senior year. 

It’s an unusual arrangement that leads to something rare in high school: long-term, trusting relations between kids and adults that bear fruit in ways most schools never aspire to, said Met Co-Director Nancy Diaz.

Schools should be small, she said, their relationships loving and caring. “That’s what we do.”

While they meet with their entire groups several times a week, advisers don’t necessarily teach traditional classes, instead spending much of their time managing students’ individualized learning plans. 

In fact, the only subject routinely taught in a traditional classroom is math, and that’s via a designated specialist. Virtually everything else a student needs to learn, according to The Met, comes from projects, individualized assignments from advisers and, most notably, internships in the real world, like Bonga’s at the nut-free bakery.

As a result, most days students come and go in a relaxed fashion, an experience more akin to an elite college campus or white-collar workplace than a teeming high school.

‘The plan behind the madness’

Created in 1996 by educators Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor, The Met has quietly become a touchstone among educators nationwide seeking to create small, personalized high schools around relevant, career-focused aspirations. Its enrollment is highly diverse: 79% are students of color and 71% come from low-income families. Its latest graduation rate: 96%.

Twenty-seven years later, The Met essentially runs its own school district, one that comprises these four schools as well as two others here and in Newport, R.I., with a total enrollment of about 820 students. Its enrollment is lottery-based, with a waiting list that resets each year so students can’t be on it for more than one year. No entrance exam is required.

Like many Met students, Mei Mei Long, class of 2017, took a while to discover its possibilities. “I didn’t really like it the first year,” she admitted at a recent alumni gathering. 

Interested in medicine when she arrived as a freshman, Long found she couldn’t find any internships in the field that would enroll a 14-year-old. So she broadened her criteria and tried out a host of different topics, eventually settling on international relations. Six years later, it’s now the topic of a masters degree she’s earning at URI, a top destination for Met students. 

“It definitely helped me prepare to be more independent in school as well in the career field,” she said. “I’m not afraid to just go out there and learn new things.”

Jordan Maddox, class of 2007, floundered at two traditional high schools before he applied to The Met for junior year. An aunt and cousin worked there and urged him to consider it.

One look at its flexible structure and dearth of organized classes and he didn’t quite know what to make of the place. “I remember telling my mother, ‘Mom, this is a daycare for high school students.’ And she was like, ‘Give it a chance. Give it time.’”

After a disastrous first quarter, Maddox’s adviser took him aside and gently noted that he was doing just enough to get by — and it showed in his projects. That wasn’t good enough, she said.

It would take him a few months to grasp “the plan behind the madness,” as he calls it: “I realized I wasn’t doing much with my time, and students around me were making things happen.” They’d created impressive internships and other experiences.

After taking in a few classmates’ quarterly independent-study exhibitions, he stepped back and realized that those who were using their time wisely “had excellent exhibitions.” Students who “loafed around” had terrible ones. 

Then he got it: “The Met is similar to the real world. What you put in is what you will receive.”

Maddox began challenging himself in subsequent efforts, in the process tapping into his own interests. A year later, he developed an ambitious, eight-week afterschool curriculum for children that explored R&B, jazz and the Motown sound. He raised enough money to take a group of students on a two-week summer trip to Detroit, Memphis and Chicago, one that brought them to Motown’s headquarters and other music-related sites. 

“I think that’s what the Met taught me: Don’t really limit yourself.”

‘They’re not just hanging with 15-year-olds’

The power of the internships stems from two simple realities: They push teens to try lots of new things, and to spend time with adults, not peers.

After 27 years of sending students into the workplace, The Met maintains a database of more than 6,000 internship sites. They typically run for about three months, and most students do two or three per school year.

“They can realize what they love, what they hate, and what they really want to focus on,” said Diaz, the co-director.

One of senior Angel Feliz’s recent internships had him helping an architecture firm power a homeless shelter with solar energy — a resume-worthy credential. But in the process, Feliz realized he didn’t enjoy working in an office “where everybody was super quiet.”

So he focused instead on information technology, and last spring interned at the University of Rhode Island’s more convivial, far less quiet, I.T. Department. His latest assignment: Improving cybersecurity and updating databases at its .

“You go through a lot of trial and error here,” he said, “but through that you understand what you do like.”

Curriculum Director Joe Battaglia said one of the school’s key values is to help students build their extended social networks, which can be particularly difficult for students of color. That’s not something most high schools do, he said.

Co-founder Littky said one key to the school is that it puts students in proximity with adults. “They’re not just hanging with 15-year-olds or 18-year-olds” all day, he said, so they learn professional behaviors that will stay with them for years. “It’s way beyond, in my mind, any other skills they get.”

Rigor vs. vigor

For critics who might scoff at the idea of a smooth crumb coat as the kind of rigorous work a high schooler should undertake, Battaglia, the curriculum director, said state standards in culinary arts likely list “smooth crumb coats” as a core competency. For what it’s worth, at nearby Johnson & Wales University, , its cake production course, requires students to “assemble, ice, stack, tier and finish” cakes using a variety of ingredients, including buttercream.

Battaglia also said The Met hews to a basic tenet: depth over breadth. In that sense, it reflects the values of the, which for 30 years promoted not just depth but personalization, trust, and teachers as coaches.

Littky noted that the late Hungarian-American psychologist, father of the concept of “flow” in work and play, has written that the way one becomes an adult thinker is to study something — anything — deeply.

In schools, Littky said, the way most adults think about rigor is all wrong: It’s about output, not input. A math teacher who fails most of his students is “rigorous,” he said, much more so than the science teacher who inspires all of his students to become scientists.

Washor, Littky’s co-founder, likes to talk about “vigor rather than rigor” — “rigor,” he jokes, is Latin for “dead and stiff.”

“Schools are places of certainty, run by churches and people who want to install certain content. But the world is uncertain. The world is alive and dynamic.”

Young people, he said, thrive in uncertainty. “They want to take risks. We want them to be measured risks. We want to go along with them on those risks.”

Since 1996, Washor has moved on to working with The Met’s umbrella non-profit, , while Littky has remained on campus as a co-director. He retired in June.

At 79, Littky is partial to wire-rimmed glasses, kufi caps and flashy sneakers. He ends his phone conversations with “Peace” and speaks plainly — on occasion, profanely — about what makes the school tick. The internships, he said, may eventually make someone like Bonga into a skilled baker, but that’s not the point. “She does great, but I don’t really give a shit” if she becomes a baker, he said. What’s important is finding what ignites her interest.

“It’s our job back here to make it deeper” than just learning how to frost a cake. “It’s really about how do you place a kid in an environment where they want to work?”

It’s a tricky formula that often takes years to get right. While a few Met students focus early on their dream careers, by the time most graduate, they’ve spent four years zig-zagging through multiple internships and experiences, often in wildly divergent fields.

Last fall, before she was a baker’s apprentice, Bonga spent two months on the water with the group , sailing as far south as the Florida Keys. That got her thinking about more ways to leverage her time for travel, perhaps as a flight attendant. 

Coming back to earth, someday she’d like to run her own bakery. But first she must master “the most essential skill” of the smooth crumb coat, said Lagasse, her bakery boss.

Before long, the talk at Awesome Sweets turned away from buttercream and toward Bonga’s planned year-end project: a huge, $500 cake for her school’s June 6 awards ceremony, attended by upwards of 150 people. Lagasse committed to offering her protege the space, time and resources to create it, but with Spring Break looming, Bonga would have just 10 days in the bakery. 

Six weeks later, she met the June 6 deadline and produced a towering, ever-so-slightly off-center, four-tiered cake in gleaming white frosting. Decorated with silky red roses and purple violets, it showed not a hint of crumb.

]]> /article/when-free-college-scholarships-arent-enough-confronting-generations-of-poverty-cleveland-schools-partner-with-businesses-to-connect-thousands-of-students-with-good-jobs/ Sun, 19 Dec 2021 20:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=582508 When the Cleveland school district two years ago, the hope was it would change the lives of students in a city with the highest poverty rate in the country.  

But district CEO Eric Gordon knew scholarships and a diploma wouldn’t be enough for many Cleveland students who come from families making less than $20,000 a year and never get to college.

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Even as cheers still echoed from the scholarship celebration, Gordon was rallying business and non-profit groups in his bid to directly attack the generational poverty and unemployment plaguing Cleveland — a program to connect thousands of high school students to real jobs with living wages and a shot at a satisfying life.

Working mostly on Zoom during the pandemic, a team of more than 115 Cleveland leaders built Planning And Career Exploration (PACE): Here to Career, designed to create clear paths to middle class jobs for all students through internships, apprenticeships, job shadowing, and visits to businesses. 

“We have a complete divide between the people who have access and awareness of all the careers that can keep them out of poverty, and the people who have no access and no awareness of the things that can lift them out of poverty,” Gordon said. “PACE is our attempt to bridge that divide.” 

Already, more than 70 Cleveland businesses have signed on to be part of the program, including hospitals and a major bank chain. 

The effort comes at a time when businesses face a worker shortage as the country emerges from the pandemic, which could be an incentive for Cleveland companies to train students.

But the Cleveland program faces steep challenges. Similar programs in other U.S. cities have not reached large numbers of students. PACE must overcome business concerns about training costs and student behavior, and the logistical issuers of having students in the workplace.  

It’s also a change in mindset for the district. The long-standing goal of preparing students for the distinct silos of college or career, which later merged into college and career. is narrowing even further.

“College, two year college, trade school is a path to a career,” Gordon explained. “But so is apprenticeship, internship, learn-to-earn, (going) straight to the workforce. And so the goal has to be ‘career’.”

A key component of PACE is making workplace learning a standard part of high school for all students, not just those in vocational programs or the top academic students. 

“We’ve built it as a universal goal – everybody should have these things,” said Anthony Battaglia, district executive director of career and college pathways.  

That’s a major challenge and one that requires a change in school and business culture that would set Cleveland apart from other cities. Workplace learning programs in U.S. cities have been unable to succeed for large numbers of students.  

In Nashville, for example, where an intense career exploration program has existed for more than a decade, only about 20 percent of seniors have a chance at an internship before graduating.

Though European countries have a culture of companies training youth, U.S. businesses shy away for a host of reasons — including insurance issues, concerns students lack skills to do the jobs, and school schedules that conflict with business hours. Transportation is also a barrier, particularly for students relying on limited public transit systems. Businesses also have no guaranteed return for their investment.

But many U.S. cities need to better connect students to high-paying jobs that bring economic security and a middle class life. 

with too many job seekers lacking the credentials for good-paying jobs. Others view it as an “opportunity gap,” where too many disadvantaged groups have never had a chance to learn what they need to compete.

“Many low-wage workers—particularly Black, Latino or Hispanic, and Indigenous workers—are trapped in without access to career exposure, premium education, or professional networks,” Brookings Institution researcher Anneliese Goger wrote. “We must focus on job creation and educational investments that offer all residents expansive career options and to new careers.”

Helen Williams, who runs educational programs for the Cleveland Foundation and helped lead PACE’s creation, said her visit to the Netherlands and Finland in 2014 inspired her to bring parts of the European model here.

“We want students to get a deep dive in what a professional career looks like,” she said. “Employers get a chance to interact with their students and think of those programs not as charity, but as really helping to develop the future workforce.”

She hopes PACE can spark a gradual change in business culture here.

“How do you make this part of the DNA?” Williams asked. “How do you bring people together so that it is seamless? It’s really a re-thinking.”

Even before the pandemic, Cleveland had a greater need to connect students to jobs than other cities. It has the highest poverty rate – 30.8 percent – in the U.S. and the worst child poverty rate in the country, with 46 percent of kids living below the poverty line.

Cleveland families made about $26,600 a year, compared to the region’s median household income of $52,100 and national median of $57,600.

Census data show just 16 percent of Cleveland adults have earned bachelor’s degrees, well below the 30% or more for the region, state and nation.

PACE aims to address those problems starting in the sixth grade when students will learn about jobs and finances, and eventually placing high school students in workplaces. 

The hope is students from poor Cleveland families will be exposed to ideas and concepts affluent and suburban parents often teach their children — careers available to graduates, jobs that fit their interests, and how to earn the degrees or certificates to succeed.

At each stage, businesses can choose how involved they want to be: At one end, companies can have tables at career fairs or let students shadow employees. At the high end businesses can offer paid internships or apprenticeships. The district hopes to eventually offer the positions to all 4,600 high school juniors and seniors each year.

PACE also prioritizes the health care, manufacturing and information technology.

Gordon has seen Cleveland’s workplace needs for years and has tried to show students what jobs are available to them, beyond the low-paying retail and fast food jobs many already have. 

The district has created specialty high schools, including one based at the county hospital and one focused on aviation and maritime careers, that do much of the work of PACE by immersing students in those fields while they also take college preparatory classes.

PACE will make those kinds of opportunities available to many more students, while also making sure that work experiences really help students. It expects students to do the real work of a job or be trained in it, as opposed to just watching or answering phones.

“We all hear about the internship where all you do is get coffee,” Battaglia said. “We want more quality internships.”

Paid internships are also an especially important piece of the puzzle. Gordon said many of his students already work long hours in fast food jobs because they need money immediately. 

“We do have kids and I’ve had this conversation directly: Mr Gordon, you want me to quit this job at McDonalds and Dave’s (supermarket) when I know we’re going to eat?” he said. “We have a lot of kids that are working in food- related industries because of food scarcity.”

How quickly the program provides opportunities remains to be seen. 

Some businesses are giving it a try. The Cleveland Clinic, the city’s largest private employer, has committed to offering paid student internships, having employees be mentors, and helping students with resumes and mock job interviews. 

And PNC Bank is adapting the that lets students apply to work and train in entry-level bank jobs. The students are guaranteed at least an interview, if not a job, after the program. 

Growing PACE will still depend on Cleveland businesses being successful with district students. Part of that will mean easing employer worries about bad behavior and tardiness from Cleveland students, the so-called soft skills that are often a barrier to employment.

“We have to change the perception of what a district graduate or student is,” school board chair Anne Bingham said. “I think at least in the downtown business community there’s a misunderstanding of what our students are, and what they bring to the table.”

‘“I think we’ll get there,” she added. “I think it’s going to be slow, but I think we’ll get there.”

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