Not College Material?

At San Dieguito High School Academy, Joel Van Hooser is a walking testament to the value of skipping a college degree and going straight to work. Don’t be shocked. He’s far more typical than the 5.0 GPA, Stanford-bound biochemistry major every parent thinks is standing next to his or her child at graduation.

Van Hooser is a 23-year-old on-campus computer network technician, earns $45,000 a year and hasn’t spent one minute on a traditional college campus as a student. He did what a majority of seniors everywhere actually do after high school: He went to work. One difference between him and far too many others who don’t go on to college is that he has a job that pays a living wage, with the potential for better jobs ahead.

“I’d always liked technical things, and realized in high school it was a good field,” Van Hooser says of his decision, supported by his parents, to forgo college and concentrate on the computer technical skills he’d found fascinating while he was a student at San Dieguito Academy. Along with his required subjects, Van Hooser was in a career-track program aimed at getting kids to make the school-to-work connection—one that gave him the skills and industry-level certifications he needed when he graduated in 1998. That led to internships through the school’s partnership with various software businesses. After graduation, this groundwork and his experience led to one job, then a second, then a promotion and now a job in his hometown doing what he loves.

“He was great,” says his former computer teacher, Jason Berend of San Dieguito Academy. “He really excelled in my classes, and now he’s really climbed above the curve.”

San Diego County’s 22 high school districts are peppered with nearly 200 elective courses that in the old days might have been called “vocational education.” What’s out there today is a far cry from those wood shop and home economics classes where “losers” were often sent to get them out of the way of the college-bound students.

Today, it’s called Career Technical Education. Or School-to-Career. Or just dealing with the estimate that only 10 percent of those who enter high school will ever earn a college degree. You can also call it the Regional Occupational Program, but it’s a far cry from the ROP job-preparation classes born in the late 1960s to give students not bound for college some chance at a future in the workforce.

Today, ROP and its federally funded sidekick, the School-to-Career program, offer everything from nurse’s assistant training to biotechnology training to silkscreening to construction trades and, yes, auto shop. But even auto shop has become diversified. Where it survives—at Grossmont’s Santana High School, for example—it includes not only instruction in how to rebuild a car but how to become an insurance adjuster and how to make repair estimates.

At San Diego Unified’s Kearny High, the Construction Technical Academy brings physics home when students learn why houses and bridges don’t fall down if they’re built right. “We’re integrating academics,” explains Rob Attabury, city schools ROP chief. “Kids see a great connection between content that was once contrived in a textbook—it’s turned into something they can see and feel.”

And something some of the students may turn into real jobs even before their graduation portraits are on the family mantel.

“Academics are very important, but the reality is everyone will work,” says Maureen Gevirtz, head of the San Diego County Office of Education’s (SDCOE) School-to-Career program. “Career preparation doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t go to college; it just means you’re finding out what you’d like to do, or getting the skills to at least get started. In this age of technology, learning really is lifelong. We’re trying to give skills so students can earn a decent living while they are learning and developing.”

Career Technical Education, however, gets just $37 million of the $3 billion a year that pays for kindergarten through 12th grades in the county. With educators in public schools so focused on proficiency in the basics, CTE often takes bigger-than-average cuts during budget crises such as the current state deficit. Typically, districts with higher minority or low-income populations get bigger chunks of state cash, based on funding formulas. (San Diego city schools and Grossmont Union High School District together receive nearly 50 percent of the ROP money coming into San Diego; the remainder is divided among 20 other districts.)

District administrators, however, make no excuses for the low priority of workforce preparation, because, they say, a student who can’t read, write or do math couldn’t make it in any job anyway. And besides, community colleges and hundreds of private training schools are readily available after graduation.

In the age of emphasis on testing and concentrated literacy efforts, CTE educators keep their sights set on the possible. Career electives offered at high schools are intended very specifically to make a connection for students between what they’re learning in their other classes and the real world. “There are still lots of kids whose learning styles just don’t fit into sitting in a seat,” says Rich Smith, head of the SDCOE’s CTE and ROP.

The clamor from San Diego businesses for more highly skilled workers, however, is loud and constant. The not-for-profit San Diego Workforce Partnership has created a strong connection between business and the schools—one the organization believes is necessary if San Diego is to have a healthy economy.

The organization published a detailed study, “A Path to Prosperity: Preparing Our Workforce” in December 2002, which says that by 2010, 66.84 percent of the jobs in the county will not require college degrees (down from 67.5 percent in 2000). Right now, the study says, far too many jobs in that category are low-paying service jobs.

According to the study, schools and job-training programs ultimately must provide not only more workers with college degrees in math and science but more highly skilled workers without college degrees in fields such as labor, high technology and medicine. One of the study’s conclusions is that without more highly paid skilled workers, businesses will be discouraged from coming to San Diego—and others may not stay because there is too small a skilled workforce to meet their needs.

“California doesn’t spend anywhere near enough on career and technical education,” says Larry Fitch, president of the San Diego Workforce Partnership. “Maybe we need technical high schools. Other countries are figuring this out. More jobs are technical in nature these days, and kids really need the opportunities to get hands-on experience, linked with internships or apprenticeships. The kids who have internships, who aren’t necessarily on a college-prep track, tend to have a higher rate of [continuing] to higher education of some sort.”

Today’s ties between the business world and schools are closer than ever; schools are not intended to do it all. Fitch says the Workforce Partnership hooked up nearly 400 businesses with 1,000 high school students for internships last summer. The county’s ROP program placed another 2,000—but that’s out of 40,000 ROP students in San Diego County. (There are an estimated 90,000 businesses of all sizes in the county.)

“It would be great to have 100,000 placements,” says Fitch. “It’s just going to take a while to get businesses to think that through. San Diego is just catching up. We are seeing more help from industry associations. Our goal is to keep expanding it, to get [businesses] to step up to the plate. ‘Tomorrow’s workforce’ may sound like a cliché, but it’s true—tomorrow’s workforce is the future of San Diego.”

According to Fitch, even traditionally reluctant labor unions also have been enthusiastic in supporting efforts to train young workers for jobs requiring increasing technological skills.

Big business, too, is spending increasing amounts of money on education projects that develop future employees. One example is SBC (formerly SBC Pacific Bell), which puts cash into dozens of school-related programs across the county every year. These grants include money for educational projects in everything from the basics and mentoring to science and technology.

“It all started years ago, because we were having trouble getting people who could pass our tests for entry-level employment,” says Margaret Pascoe, SBC’s San Diego executive director of external affairs. “Our goal is to work with schools to help them understand what we’re looking for” when there are openings in SBC’s 6,000-person San Diego workforce.

Pascoe also volunteers her time with the Economic Development Corporation’s Education Workforce Diversity Project. One day a week, she is in an AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) class at Gompers Secondary School to share with the ninth through 12th graders what they’ll need to know about getting along in their working lives after graduation.

“It doesn’t matter where you are on the job/career ladder,” says Pascoe, “you still need to learn to work together and be able to look people in the eye. I was impressed with the students and the teachers—their openness and receptivity to new ideas. The kids really helped each other. In the end, I think I get as much out of it as they do.”

County schools officials also want students to know what “labor market demand” means, and the Workforce Partnership—along with dozens of other youth-oriented consortiums, councils and committees—is only too happy to tell them. And to make it clear that employers need mature, disciplined, well-groomed workers who know how to answer a phone and to be part of a team.

“One of our goals is to strengthen the relationship with the Workforce Partnership,” says SDCOE’s Smith. “Number one, they have lots of people coming to them looking for work. Sometimes we have the infrastructure in place to give them those skills, put them in training. Our main objective here is to get them ready to work.”

Teachers also are part of the school-to-career experience, and not just CTE instructors. Increasingly, so-called “externships” put classroom teachers temporarily in an industry that relates to their field. “That way they can go back to their classrooms and design lesson plans based on real-world situations,” says SDCOE’s Gevirtz. “Our bywords are ‘rigor’ and ‘relevance’—for both students and teachers.”

The goal is to make a connection for a student who wonders, for instance, why geometry is important. In a perfect world, making that connection might lead to the pursuit of a career after high school—not just pounding nails but building houses, then designing houses, then becoming an engineer or an architect. For some students, it may be the best shot at a job that allows them to move ahead—to confidently take on new educational challenges in the future, far beyond what they’d envisioned for themselves sitting in that math class.

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