Part of the push for a new Career Tech High School is about making things a little easier for business owners like Ron Smith.
'To find good, quality people that we can train, it's difficult,' said Smith, president of Precision Unlimited Inc., an Abilene business with about 27 employees, 15 of whom are air-conditioning technicians.
He supports the $25 million bond proposal to finance a new school, an issue up for vote Nov. 3.
Cisco College offers training in heating, venting and air conditioning, and Abilene High School already offers a sequence of HVAC classes. But a need remains to offer more training, Smith said.
'The TSTC program has been eliminated for the air-conditioning side,' he pointed out, referring to Texas State Technical College West Texas, which offered courses at its Sweetwater campus.
Yet such a decision wasn't made without first considering the labor market.
Low enrollment led the school to drop the program about 18 month ago, said Braid Blanks, director of marketing and communications for all four TSTC West Texas campuses, although the college hopes to reopen the training next fall in Breckenridge.
'When we discontinued the program, there was not a large demand for the job in this region,' Blanks said.
HVAC technical work recently was considered a zero growth industry in the Abilene region, according to a Texas Workforce Commission projection that looked at jobs from 2006 to 2016.
That's not to suggest opportunities don't exist elsewhere. Statewide, experts saw a brighter jobs future, with 23.6 percent job growth predicted from 2006 to 2016.
Smith said he didn't know about those projections. What he sees is an aging technician workforce ' which means opportunities are coming for young people with the right skills and interests.
'The industry in Abilene has become an older group. There's going to be a lot of us retiring in the next 10 years,' Smith said.
Job projections ' especially those made before the drastic downturn in the economy ' can vary greatly in their accuracy, noted Mary Ross, executive director of Workforce Solutions for West Central Texas, the local agency under the Texas Workforce Commission that helps people find jobs.
'It sounds great to say, 'Hey, we think there's going to be lots of jobs in whatever,' but the reality may be completely different,' Ross said.
HVAC job openings, for example, are not impossible to find in the Abilene area, especially in smaller communities, she said.
To help with the design of programs at the proposed Career Tech High School, Ross said her agency provided occupational data.
Not all of the district's choices matched her agency's ideas of possible growth industries.
'An example is cosmetology. That's not an area we necessary recommended,' said Ross, who has participated on committees that called for expanded career tech offerings in Abilene schools.
She said the agency suggested 'something in entrepreneurship, small business management.'
It didn't make the cut, while the district plans to offer course sequences in subjects such as criminal justice, culinary arts, graphic design, computer repair, automotive technology and animal science/vet tech studies, among others. (Students with an interest in health careers may attend a separate AISD program, Holland Medical High School.)
Judging programs
W. Norton Grubb, author of 'The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling,' said in a phone interview that just because a course title sounds good, that doesn't make it good career preparation.
'I visited a vet tech program in Ohio, in one of these big area vocational schools, and, I swear to God, what a couple of these poor kids did was spend all day cleaning these dog cages,' said Grubb of the University of California-Berkeley.
Grubb said he believes vocational education can greatly benefit high school students if done in a way that emphasizes the ability for teachers to collaborate across subject matter. It should also include college-prep classes, said Grubb, whose book, written with Marvin Lazerson, challenged the idea that education works best when thought of as simply workplace preparation.
Abilene leaders tout how teachers will integrate vocational themes into academic subjects as part of the proposed Career Tech school, an idea that's also a part of efforts praised by Grubb in California to develop a 'partnership academy' model.
Such 'new voc-ed' programs are becoming more popular nationwide, although he said they can be difficult to set up and manage initially.
However, Grubb said he sees little benefit in 'old voc-ed' programs that lack higher-level components. After looking at a description of the proposed Abilene school, he questioned some choices in the new Abilene school.
Cosmetology programs, for example, 'should never be allowed in high school,' he said.
Grubb explained that employers have traditionally shunned high school graduates of 'old voc-ed' programs that focused on narrow skills, and the tough economy is making things even harder on the young. The youth unemployment rate nationwide topped 25 percent in August.
'Kids coming out of high school are just not going to get work. Employers are going to hire people out of community college or experienced people,' said Grubb.
Not always, however.
Smith, president of Precision Unlimited, recently hired a worker just out of high school who completed HVAC courses at Abilene High School.
Speaking generally, however, he said he sees Career Tech classes as perhaps a first step on the HVAC career path, helping students to learn if they have an interest in the field.
'We need a little bit more background before they get to Cisco (College),' Smith said.
He said he supports the new school not just to help his business but because of what he sees as the future of jobs.
'In Texas, probably across the United States, we're going to see more and more service-type work that's going to be done,' Smith said.
It may be computers, air conditioning or something else, but 'it's going to be service-oriented,' said Smith, who is on the vocational education board for Abilene ISD.
Business support
Many business leaders like Smith ' some prominent, others less so ' have rallied around the bond proposal. Three hundred people signed a petition offering support for bringing the Career Tech High School concept to voters, less than two years after a similar bond proposal failed, rejected by a 54 percent to 46 percent margin. If passed, the owner of an average-valued home in Abilene ISD ' with a market value of $87,964 ' would be charged about $1.12 more each month in school taxes, with homeowners with disabilities and those over 65 exempt from the tax hike.
The overwhelming majority of signatures came from the business community. (Among the signers was Kim Nussbaum, publisher of the Reporter-News. Her signature was not meant as a pledge to campaign for the project, and Nussbaum has not exerted any influence on coverage of the bond in the newspaper.)
Jackson Boen is vice president of the government services division for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas, one of Abilene's biggest employers.
Echoing similar comments from other business leaders about getting involved with schools, he said he signed the petition because 'that's our future workforce.'
The Career Tech school is a way to engage students and keep them interested in high school, he said.
'Businesses have everything to gain from a great workforce,' Boen said. 'Businesses can survive and thrive during economic downtimes when you have a good, viable pool of employees to work with.'
One prominent business leader, car dealer Mike Dunnahoo, told the Reporter-News that the proposed school should help keep high school graduates in Abilene, and on the Web site backing the measure, backers write that the city 'must develop its own workforce.'
Ross, of Workforce Solutions, said employers talk to her about worries they have ' especially if their workforce is older ' about suddenly having to replace several high-skilled, knowledgeable employees.
'I think that's where there's a lot of interest in a career high school,' said Ross. From the point of view of the business owner, it's that 'we need people with these skills, even though there's not huge job growth. If we don't start training them and getting them interested, they're going to take a different career path.'
It's hard to argue against the impression that support from business leaders is stronger than from any other area of the community.
Two school board members voted against placing the current proposal on the ballot, expressing concerns about worn-out elementary schools or moving career-focused classes away from the city's two main high schools.
The proposed Career Tech school would have more than 600 students enrolled in grades 10-12 ' and, district leaders say, it would be popular with students. One survey suggests that 44 percent of high school students want to take a sequence of career-focused courses like those that would be offered at the school.
However, such sequences exist already, and state data shows that enrollment is at a five-year low. Last school year, 21.6 percent of AISD students (including learners of all ages) took a sequence of career and technical education classes, compared with 27.3 percent in 2004-05.
Business backing elsewhere
Even if the enrollment for such career and technology education courses isn't showing a steady increase in Abilene, the percentage of students enrolled is already higher than the state average. Statewide, 21.3 percent of students were enrolled in a career-tech sequence last year, and that percentage has increased ' albeit only slightly ' each year for the past five years.
Abilene is not alone in looking to expand career tech programs.
In Lubbock, 'We've been working on this for about six to eight years,' said Terri Patterson, director of workforce development for the Lubbock Economic Development Alliance.
Students of the four high schools in Lubbock take buses to attend career and tech ed courses at the district's Byron Martin Advanced Technology Center, which opened 12 years ago.
Patterson said her agency is taking the lead in bringing business leaders to sit down with school district officials.
'We're building a pipeline of workers. We've never been able to do that before,' Patterson said.
Ross said she has heard the same 'pipeline' phrase from Abilene employers.
When wooing companies to Lubbock, having a solid workforce 'is probably in the top three issues of every project that we work on, because they're not going to want to come somewhere if it's not going to feed them a pipeline of workers,' Patterson said.
In Lubbock, though, no one is really tracking what happens to the students after graduation. An effort is under way to do so, she said.
Still, she's confident in the approach, and said the district's efforts are becoming a model for the state. In Lubbock ISD, 18.8 percent of all students are taking career and technology education sequences, below the state average. This percentage has increased slightly the past two years, although it is down from a high of 21 percent in 2005-06.
'We're really concentrating on the industries that are best supported here so that we can tie them to internships, co-op programs, part-time jobs ' to possibly get hands-on experience to put their education to work,' Patterson said. About 10 percent of students taking career-tech ed sequences also get paid internships, according to a district official.
Smith, the Abilene business owner, said that he would like to offer an internship. As a member of the vocational board, he knows that 'it takes some funding and some people to get that developed.'
He also acknowledged that internships can be 'a separate idea' from the proposed Career Tech School, although proponents of the bond issue are gathering pledges of support from businesses to offer summer jobs and internships.
About 100 AISD students get real-world medical industry experience through Holland Medical School programs, while another 240 or so participate in mainly retail and office-based 'career prep' programs.
'Helped me prepare for college'
In Odessa, the Ector County Career Center opened in 1995 after a bond election, with the strong backing of business leaders.
Tiffani James was part of the first graduating class at the school.
'People thought that going there, you can't go to college. But going there actually helped prepare me for college,' James said. She graduated with a degree in marketing from the University of Texas and found success in her field, working on national advertising accounts and then, for a time, with the Lance Armstrong Foundation, well-known for its 'Livestrong' bracelets.
After marriage, she settled in Llano, where she's a Realtor and the marketing manager for Jesse James Real Estate.
'Teachers empowered us. We didn't have bells. They taught us you have to be at your next appointment at this time, so it was all set up with appointments,' Anderson said.
Abilene leaders visited the school in 2007 and walked away impressed.
'It completely and totally restored my faith in secondary education,' businessman Randy Pool told the Reporter-News at the time.
Despite the enthusiasm, school district officials in Ector County decided last year to revamp the school, making it more like Lubbock's advanced technology center than a stand-alone high school.
Enrollment peaked in 1998-99, then 'started a steady decline for a large number of reasons,' said Ian Roark, director of career and technical education for ECISD.
After enrollment in 2007-08 bottomed at 396 full-time students, the district decided to make a change, Roark said.
James, the Career Center graduate, said she thought she had an idea about what may have led to the decline.
'There was a stigma with the school always,' recalled James. 'And I think that's part of why it didn't survive: 'Oh, it's for kids that aren't going to go to college.' '
For James, however, 'I was a normal kid. I didn't get in trouble, and I did well there,' she said, adding that she knows of others in her class who were also successful in their careers.
'Designed to address employer needs'
Roark told the Odessa American that the change to the career center will allow for additional certifications to be offered to students, like Texas Master Gardener and Adobe Authorized Training Center.
Willie Taylor, executive director of Workforce Solutions Permian Basin, said that the change was made in part because the Career Center wasn't living up to the expectation of employers ' to keep a trained, quality workforce in town.
'We can go to Abilene or Fort Worth or try to go to Central Texas and try to recruit people, but ... not too many people are going to move to Midland-Odessa,' Taylor said.
He said business leaders spoke with school officials about their ideas for the Career Center: to engage students so they don't drop out, and to boost the local labor pool.
So the percentage of Career Center graduates going to college ' which both Roark and Jackson pointed out was fairly high ' just wasn't the most relevant statistic.
'Most folks in the district said that's not the reason we had a career center ... the Career Center was designed to address employer needs,' Taylor said.
College, of course, will be an option for Career Tech graduates, proposal backers say.
Language on the Web site backing the measure suggests, however, that it may not be the priority: Some graduates of the career tech high school may choose to attend college but most will not attend college because it is not a requirement for the careers they select.
Grubb, the Berkeley professor, said he would be worried about that language, which 'suggests they're really preparing people for the labor force at age 18, which is again, not a good thing to do in terms of the way the labor force' operates.
Still, he said voc-ed programs can be successful if a business community truly embraces the concept.
'If employers are backing it, and really will back it with supplies and equipment, and then positions where students will have internships and summer jobs ' if they really will rally around it, that's really great,' Grubb said. 'They've got to pony up. They've got to actually provide these different sources of support.'
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