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The San Ramon Valley school board Tuesday received an update on the district’s efforts in career technical education (CTE), hearing from district officials, teachers and students immersed in the instructional programs focused on college and career readiness.
“The students in career technical education leave the classroom with more than just a programming language under their belts,” said Nicholas Henderson, a sophomore in AP computer science at Danville’s Monte Vista High. “They’ve developed important skills, work habits, and a unique and applicable style of thinking that can follow them throughout college and into the workplace.”
The CTE programs offer rigorous coursework aimed at helping students prepare for what they would experience after high school — in college or in the workplace — in specific subject areas, according to district administrator Jason Reimann, who led the 45-minute presentation to the school board Tuesday night in Danville.
“The career technical education benefits students in terms of them being able to apply the learning that they’re doing within their classrooms. Those academic experiences become meaningful,” said Reimann, the district’s director of instructional services for secondary education.
Michelle Xue, a student at California High in San Ramon, told the school board, “I came into high school not knowing what I was going to be doing as a job or what kind of jobs were out there.”
“But I took intro to engineering design as a freshman and that really introduced me to applying things you learn at school rather than just grinding out math problems and memorizing your presidents and memorizing stuff like that,” she added. “It became more of, ‘Wow, people actually do this for a living.'”
District high schools offer CTE pathways — multiple courses in a subject area offered in sequence working toward a final, or capstone course — in fields such as engineering, information communications technology, sports medicine, bio-medicine, culinary arts and automotive, with availability depending on school sites.
Unlike traditional high school vocational coursework, CTE pathways “are aligned with those high-growth, high-skill, high-wage jobs that are going to be available not only today but in the future,” according to Reimann.
“We also expect our CTE programs to offer flexibility for students, so that students have more choices in terms of on-ramps — the different ways that they’ll reach those capstone courses — as well as off-ramps — what they’ll do after they’ve completed our CTE program,” Reimann said.
Part of the district’s recent focus has been to better synchronize programs across the district so students taking similar CTE courses at different school sites leave the classrooms with the same skill-sets, according to Reimann.
Other efforts have included aligning CTE pathways more with University of California and California State University standards as well as with Common Core objectives, he added.
“I’m really excited that all of this Common Core stuff is finally catching up with CTE classes,” Steve Dick, a teacher on special assignment in CTE, told the school board. “The fact is that in the CTE classes, we can’t operate without Common Core. We can’t do our automotive math unless the math teachers are teaching the math.”
Greg Marvel, school board vice president, also found a positive connection between Common Core standards and the district’s efforts with CTE.
“One of the key foundational, philosophical points of Common Core is that these students leave our halls with every possible door open to them for a future because you don’t know at 16, 15 — heck you don’t know at 20 a lot of times — what you want to do with your life in terms of a career and a passion,” Marvel said.
“I think the key takeaway from all of this is giving kids a passion, not necessarily about one thing or another, but a passion about keeping ‘all my options open as a child,'” he added. “You may not know you have a passion for computer science, but the doors that get opened through CTE may do that.”
To enhance the program moving forward, the district will be utilizing new metrics for measuring CTE success, looking at creating student internships and teacher externships in certain fields, and continuing to partner with nearby school districts as part of the Diablo Gateways to Innovation Consortium, according to Reimann.
A new careers in teaching pathway is due to be added soon, Reimann said.
In other business Tuesday
* The school board appointed 16 people to serve two- and three-year terms on the district’s Facilities Oversight and Advisory Committee (FOAC) — a group consisting of 12 returning members and four new applicants.
The committee’s primary responsibilities include oversight of Measure D facilities bond projects and expenditures, and review of current and future school district facility plans.
FOAC members also make recommendations about district facility standards in order to better align with the needs of 21st-century learning, work with district staff to develop a list of facilities priorities that would require new funding sources, and review solutions for how to properly protect SRVUSD facilities and maintenance, according to district officials.
“The committee works really hard and their thoughtful input is very helpful to us as liaisons, and I know to the board as a whole,” said board president Denise Jennison, one of two board members who sit as FOAC liaisons. “This is just a tremendous example of the community and the school district working together in the best interests of children.”
* Board members approved proclamations to support and raise awareness about three annual observances.
With its votes, the board declared the district would recognize February as African American History Month and Feb. 2-6 as National School Counseling Week and Words Matter Week — the latter being an anti-bullying campaign known last year as No Name-Calling Awareness Week.
