How some Oregon school districts are handling career and technical education

This school year, Oregon received more than $17 million to fund and strengthen career and technical education. Right now, there are more than 1,000 CTE programs offered throughout the state and many schools continue to expand their offerings.

The Oregon Department of Education is in the process of creating its latest strategic CTE plan. But what does demand look like at schools right now? To help answer this question and more we’ll hear from Stephen DuVal, the director of college and career readiness for the Bend-La Pine School District, and Rhonda Rhodes, the principal at the Career Technical Education Center at the Salem-Keizer School District.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon schools received over $17 million in federal grants this year for career and technical education (CTE). There are more than 1,000 CTE programs throughout the state, and many schools are expanding their offerings. Meanwhile, the Oregon Department of Education is in the process of creating its latest strategic CTE plan. Given all of this, we wanted to get a broad sense for what career and technical education is like in Oregon these days. Rhonda Rhodes is the principal of the Career Technical Education Center in the Salem-Keizer School District. Stephen DuVal is the director of College and Career Readiness for the Bend-La Pine school district. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Stephen DuVal: Thanks for having us.

Rhonda Rhodes: Thank you.

Miller: Rhonda Rhodes, first. Can you explain how your center, the Career Technical Education Center (CTEC) in Salem-Keizer schools, works?

Rhodes: Absolutely. CTEC is really unique, and in Salem-Keizer, CTEC has the opportunity to serve 11th and 12th graders from around our two cities, from every single one of our large comprehensive high schools, for a two year program of study. Students spend half of their schedule with us, so we need to get them half of their graduation requirements. We have them for four of their eight classes for two years. And we integrate curriculum in a really unique way. So students take two CTE courses in the industry that they’ve chosen to study. And then two of their core subjects, whether it’s English and science, or English and social studies, are taught to them entirely through the lens of their industry. Everything’s connected, everything’s relevant. Students never have to ask “when am I going to use this,” because everything we do with them is preparing them for their career.

Miller: Stephen DuVal, so that’s a stand alone center in Salem-Keizer schools. Is that different from what you have in Bend-La Pine schools?

DuVal: Yeah, it’s a different model than we have. We have seven high schools in our school district, five comprehensive and two choice option high schools. And each high school has CTE programming at the site for students to participate in. So we don’t have a separate center in Bend-La Pine. But we offer 35 programs across our entire district over those seven high schools. So it’s more integrated within their traditional school day,

their seven period day. Depending on the high school, there’s different programming. But students participate in those classes whether it’s once, twice, some students participate in multiple programs at once throughout the day, and participate that way.

Miller: Before the acronym CTE became relatively common, I was used to hearing about vocational or technical training. Is there a difference? Or is it basically the same idea with a new name?

Rhodes: I think about these concepts very differently. One of the things that makes this current version of career technical education so powerful is that we are not training students for just one single job. For example, CTEC does not have a commercial truck driver license program. That would be a program that would lead to only one job. Every single one of our programs has dozens of job opportunities available within a sector. So just to use an example, students in our residential construction program can graduate from our program, and they have industry certifications, they can certainly immediately go to work framing, roofing, drywall, those sorts of things. But we also have a lot of students exit, and they’ve had a taste of electrical and plumbing, and they’re headed to apprenticeships. They really enjoyed the home design aspect of our program, and they’re headed to a four year university for architecture or construction engineering management.

So CTE, in its current iteration, opens the doors to students who are interested in any level of higher education, or no higher education who just want to get on with it and start making a lot of money. And I think that’s a little bit different than voc-ed back in the day, if that makes sense.

Miller: It makes a lot of sense. And actually, your example of not letting students pursue commercial driver’s licenses because that is a kind of a one way road towards one job, that was clarifying for me.

Stephen DuVal, how much do you feel like the students that you’re talking to, or maybe even more so their parents, understand the distinctions that Rhonda was just outlining?

DuVal: I think the students see that. I think our teachers do a phenomenal job of working with them in terms of career paths and trainings that are available to them, and different levels of education that will lead to different paths within the same industry. I do think for our parents, we work to kind of make them aware that this isn’t a vocational training program like you might be familiar with when you were in school, that this is a whole new iteration. And I think the kids go home though, and they’re excited. They talk to the parents, and they talk to their families around what we did today, and what Mrs so-and-so or Mr so-and-so said we could do with this in the future. And I think that our parents and our families are starting to see, through their students eyes, the different paths that are in front of them. So I do think that there are some misconceptions in terms of what folks might think CTE is. But the further we go down this road with this current version, I think we’re starting to see those mindsets shift with our families.

Miller: Rhonda, industry needs can change pretty quickly. How do you keep up with the employment demands that you’re hearing from the private sector? And how much do you take their requests into consideration when you’re designing an educational curriculum or a course pathway?

Rhodes: Industry involvement is one of our cornerstones at CTEC. We actually have a really unique role. We have a relationship with the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce. We have three business liaisons. And their entire role is to connect business and industry and industry professionals to our programs. And we do that in a number of ways, but specifically to your question, each of our programs, we conduct quarterly industry advisory committee meetings. And we ask them “What do you need in employees? Do you still value the certifications we are offering? Are there new certifications that would give our students a greater competitive advantage toward employment? Are there new techniques? Are there new pieces of equipment that we should train students to utilize?”

I’ll give you an example, our auto body repair and paint program, our industry advisor said “We are getting so many electric vehicles in our body shops, and the safety protocols around working with them are different. We would love it if your students were familiar with them.” And we had to write a grant. I’m a public educator, I can’t just buy a Tesla so that our students can train on it. But we were able to write a grant and get an electric vehicle kit car build that we could utilize to train students in those skills. That’s the type of relevance that you need to maintain if you truly want to have next level programming. And we can’t prepare students for the workforce of yesterday. We have to prepare them for the workforce of today and tomorrow. And the only way to do that is to connect regularly with industry, and then truly listen to them, and work to incorporate their guidance.

Miller: Stephen, I want to turn to the age of students. You’re both focused on high school students, but in some European countries and I think in others as well, they start earlier in terms of, I don’t know if they still call it tracking but that’s what it strikes me as. In Germany, kids who are the equivalent of fifth graders, many of them slot into schools that either have trajectories for universities or for various skilled trade jobs. What do you think of that model, an earlier start with relatively predictable paths?

DuVal: I think leaving as many doors open for students as long as possible is the way to go. We’ve all been through school, and some of those students that may be struggling in middle school, they come back to you in high school and they’ve got it all figured out. And they’re on a different trajectory than maybe what most folks thought for them when they were in sixth or seventh grade. So in my mind, keeping as many doors open as long as possible. We want our students to be full option graduates. So when they leave, whatever option they want to take, they can choose and change. And we know that people change majors when they go to college, they change careers, they change industries. Very rarely do you have the person that graduates and stays in the same role, career for 30 straight years anymore. And so giving students that opportunity to see all those doors and participate and dabble in a variety of things so that they can find what’s right for them, I think is more along the line of what we’re trying to achieve here.

Do we have CTE like programs in our middle schools? While they’re not officially labeled as CTE, they’re in the same industry fields. And so we have culinary, we have engineering, we have these programs at the middle school level that can start to expose these students to certain careers at an early age before they forecast into high school and see maybe more advanced levels. But for us, I would have a hard time with even my own student who’s a fifth grader, having them moved or tracked at this young age knowing that he’s got so many different potential paths in front of him.

Miller: I should remind folks that, Rhonda, we actually talked about one of your newest programs in the fall, the Behavioral Health and Human Services program, which is aimed at giving students a grounding in all kinds of different possible careers in psychology or sociology or counseling or social work. So folks can search for that on our website.

I’m curious how you think about the percentages of so-called nontraditional students based on gender. This is something that the Oregon Department of Education tracks, among other things, and they found some pretty dismal numbers in terms of representation, say, of girls in construction fields. What do you see as the biggest imbalances? And is this something that you’re trying to address?

Rhodes: That’s such a great question. We have a process for recruiting students into our programs. We really try to bring nontraditional students with us to our recruitment events, so that if a young lady might be interested in manufacturing welding and engineering, she can see that one of our young professionals at that recruitment booth is also a young lady. We try to really help to see themselves in each and every one of the fields.

And yet, we still have a high number of females who gravitate toward our cosmetology program, even if we bring our young men to recruitment. We still see that we have more males than females applying to our residential construction program. Our numbers though have far less disparity than the industry itself. So we are trending in the right direction. For example, we’re looking at about 30% of our applicants to residential construction being female students for next year. And while that’s not 50/50, it’s certainly far better than the sub-10% that you would see among current industry professionals.

I think for me, there’s a balance between wanting to have each program reflect both the gender and racial demographics of our entire community, and wanting to make sure that students are really working in their area of passion. So I think what’s the most important for me is that every single student has access to equally high wage, high paying career opportunities. And so as long as our female students, for example, or our Students of Color, have access and are accessing high wage careers at the same rate, I feel comfortable, even if some of our programs are a little more female heavy or male heavy.

Miller: You mentioned equal access to high wage careers. That seems like one possible metric. Overall, how do you assess how you’re doing? What do you look at to say “we’re achieving our goals” or “we are falling short”?

Rhodes: What we do is survey every single one of our students upon graduation. And then every year, we conduct an alumni survey. We want to see what we call positive placement rates. We want to know that attending and completing a CTEC program made a difference in their outcomes. We had to define positive placement, because this is not data that people are collecting anywhere that I’m aware of. We define positive placement as a student who is employed at a living wage in the industry, a career job, an apprenticeship program (say, electrical, plumbing, pipefitting,) a two year or four year university or college related to their CTEC pathway, or the military. And if someone is in a job that they did not need their CTEC program to obtain, for example, if they are working at Kentucky Fried Chicken out of our manufacturing welding and engineering program, we would not consider that positive placement.

We have had about a 92% positive placement average in the seven years that I’ve been the principal at CTEC. And we look program by program, where are we hitting the mark? Where are we missing the mark?

Miller: Stephen DuVal and Rhonda Rhodes, thanks very much.

DuVal: Thank you.

Rhodes: Thank you.

Miller: Stephen DuVal is the director of college and career readiness for Bend-La Pine schools. Rhonda Rhodes is the principal of the Career Technical Education Center (CTEC) in Salem-Keizer schools.

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