ROGERS -- School District administrators are revising a high school course to get more students interested in exploring career fields that interest them.
Internship, a course available only to seniors, allows students to leave school early to participate in supervised work experiences. Students must complete 360 hours of work over the course of a school year.
Arkansas Career Fields
The Arkansas Department of Career Education has identified six career fields, which are subdivided into 16 career clusters and 38 pathways. Students are normally exposed to career field exploration in middle school and early high school. The fields represent the broadest aggregation of careers. They are:
• Agriculture, food and natural resources
• Business, marketing and management
• Communications and information technology
• Industrial and engineering technology
• Health science, criminal justice and public safety
• Human services and education
Source: Staff Report
The course didn't attract enough students to be offered this school year. A likely reason for that is the extraordinary number of work hours the course demands, said Dawn Stewart, director of career and technical education.
"That length of time is a challenge. That's a barrier," Stewart said.
Stewart and Lance Arbuckle, principal of New Technology High School, are redesigning the course to inject more flexibility into it. The new Internship course would be piloted at New Technology High School starting next fall if the School Board approves it.
Stewart and Arbuckle envision a course that's a mix of internships and classroom instruction. Students would spend their classroom time reflecting on the internship experiences they've had and figuring out what kind of internship they want to pursue next.
"It's designed to help kids know is this what I really want to do with my life?" Arbuckle said.
The course would be available to juniors as well as seniors, Arbuckle said. They could take it for one or two years.
The district's Course Review Committee will consider the course change at its meeting next Wednesday. If the committee approves the change, it will be presented to the School Board for approval next month, Stewart said.
New Technology offers a course called career investigations for juniors and seniors. It requires students to pick two career fields that interest them and learn everything they can about those careers, but there is no internship component to it, Arbuckle said.
The subject of internships came up during a meeting district officials hosted Wednesday on the topic of career and technical education. Stewart facilitated the three-hour meeting, titled "Building Bridges from the Classroom to the Career Field." More than a dozen people from the district, the business community and other educational institutions attended the meeting.
Tom Woodruff, a marketing teacher at Rogers High School, said it's important for the district to draw on the talents of the surrounding business community for the benefit of students.
"We can teach frameworks and book knowledge, but our students need a little bit more than that," Woodruff said. "I'm not sure we're taking advantage of our business community to teach some of those finer points."
Steve Cox, vice president of economic development at the Rogers-Lowell Area Chamber of Commerce, pledged to help connect the schools with businesses willing to host student interns.
Mike Harvey, chief operating officer of the Northwest Arkansas Council, gave a presentation on the growth of various job sectors in Northwest Arkansas. Results of the most recent annual employer survey showed 54 percent of local employers said they have problems recruiting workers to fill open positions. That was the first time in the survey's history that number surpassed 50 percent, Harvey said.
"We're already seeing the community wake up to this issue," Harvey said.
Meanwhile, the workforce is getting older and many workers are approaching retirement age. For example, about 20 percent of public-school teachers are at least 55 years old, Harvey said.
Harvey added of all the jobs available in the region, only about a quarter to one-third of them require anything beyond a high school diploma.
Sixty-two students from Rogers High School and Heritage High School attended Northwest Technical Institute last fall semester, where they received training in specific career fields. Those classes are available to high school students at no cost, said Stephanie Trolinger, director of the Secondary Career Center at the institute.
"I think a lot more students are realizing they can get a jumpstart on a career at a much younger age," Trolinger said.
NW News on 10/01/2015