During the latest meeting of the Plymouth Community School Corporation (PCSC) School Board, a presentation updating the board about the North Central CTE Cooperative was given by Jennifer Felke, Director of Career and Technical Education.
“One of the things that I am most excited about that we are going to embark on over the next school year is a partnership with Purdue IN-MaC, which is the Next Generation Manufacturing Competitiveness Center,” Felke said.
She went on to say that she has written a competitive Perkins Grant to acquire approximately $50,000 for technical assistance to partner within the cooperative. “So, we’re going to be working with Knox as well as Plymouth instructors and administrators as well as industry representatives from Marshall and Starke Counties. And our goal is to build a pathway system to provide our schools an innovative CTE learning experience through having a high tech curriculum, hands on learning so that we’re preparing our students for a successful and rewarding career whether they go into the workforce, they enlist in the military, or they go on to continue their education.”
At the end of the process, which would last about a year, Felke said they hope to build better relationships between industry and education. “We hope to align education to industry needs and state requirements. That’s the big reason why we need industry to come to the table.”
They also hope to identify key employ ability skills and create quality work-based learning experiences. “The state is really pushing on more work-based learning. And one of those experiences look like, they want them to be quality, we hope to possibly embed some of those within our programs and we hope to continue to build on some efforts we’ve done this year in precision machining which is creating a school-based enterprise.”
The precision machining program at PCSC is doing some work with Universal Bearings in Bremen. “We hope to keep building on that and allowing our kids to be the creators and really being entrepreneurs,” said Felke.
Felke told the board that 36 percent of the jobs in Marshall County are in manufacturing. “So, there’s a real need for this partnership,” said Felke.
Next year at Plymouth High School, as the host school, five new programs will be starting. Medical Assisting will be the Year 2 program in Nursing. Felke said that they will no longer be offering CNA.
“What we have found is most of our business reps, other CTE districts, they’re moving toward the Medical Assisting pathway. We believe that offers more choices and opportunities for our students. And we have a record application list next year for that program of 35 students, so we have never seen those kinds of numbers in a Year 2. So, we’re very excited,” said Felke.
The Education Careers program that is currently located in the high school will become a shared program. “We know that we need to grow our own and create a pipeline of educators,” Felke said. The program will be available to other schools in the area that don’t have the capacity to offer that program.
The Early Childhood Education program is currently being provided by Marshall-Starke. Felke states that CTE can improve upon the program by moving it to the high school.
“We’re starting Fire and Rescue at the Plymouth Fire Station. We’re partnering with Fire Chief Holm and we’re very, very excited about that. There’s a real need for EMTs, paramedics, and fire men and women,” she said.
Veterinary Science will also be added to CTE. It will be housed at Plymouth High School. “Our applications are already over capacity for that program,” Felke said.
She added, “We’re looking forward to giving kids more opportunities and if you don’t know a lot about Career Tech and Ed, it has really changed, evolved over the last 10 or 15 years. Every program offers kids usually some type of work base learning experience. Most programs have both college credits and certifications. Most of them offer both of those, but all of them offer at least one of those, an industry certification or college credit. I’m excited to have more students involved in Career and Tech Ed and giving them, kind of what I say is they get to test drive a career before they go on to college or enter the workforce.”
Superintendent Mitch Mawhorter asked Felke about the number of new students in the program. “We had, on count day this past September, 542 students in programs in the cooperative. So, that’s cooperative wide, ten schools. We are currently sitting at 804 applications. That’s applications, not enrollments, but applications. And almost every program that we have is at or near capacity. And I thought adding five new programs in Plymouth, two new programs in Knox, are we going to saturate the market. That was a little bit of my concern, are we offering too many programs. But what I’ve seen from the numbers, is that we can keep looking at offering more,” said Felke.
Felke was asked to give a “ballpark” number of those applications are from Plymouth schools. Felke said that since Plymouth is the biggest school, they usually get half the capacity in every program. “Plymouth enrollment is usually between 30 and 50 percent of the junior/senior numbers.”
“There’s a lot of growth going on and we have students that are going on to college with, if you do two years in the nursing program, almost 30 college credits and the possibility of a national certification,” she said.
