A district on Florida’s west coast expanded manufacturing internships with help from small businesses.

And in Tennessee, high school students are developing high-tech skills and earning college credit at a Volkswagen automobile factory.

School districts are focusing more attention on manufacturing as the need for middle-skill jobs increases. In particular, industrial mechanic programs have taken off as more employers seek workers who have the technical know how to operate advanced manufacturing equipment.

“Programs that combine in-class learning with on-the-job training are the most effective” says Gardner Carrick, vice president of strategic initiatives for The Manufacturing Institute, the education center for the National Association of Manufacturers trade association.

“These programs allow students to learn manufacturing skills in the context of actual manufacturing applications, and build strong relationships between companies and schools.”

Manufacturing should remain the largest economic sector in the U.S. through 2020, with advanced manufacturing accounting for much of the growth.

By 2020, an estimated 3.5 million manufacturing jobs will be created, yet the skills gap indicates 2 million of those jobs will go unfilled, according to the institute’s report, “The Skills Gap in U.S. Manufacturing: 2015 and Beyond.” (91心頭mag.me/x7).

The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics shows an immediate need for industrial maintenance technicians, high-tech machine operators and programmers, as well as welders. Proficiency with 3D printers, advanced robotics and virtual reality will be in increasing demand as manufacturing companies adopt those tools, Carrick says.

On average, U.S. manufacturing workers earned $77,506 a year in 2013, about 20 percent more than the average worker in other industries, the report found.

To get these jobs, applicants need at least a community college or industry certification, and some positions require bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degrees.

“There is still a lingering perception that manufacturing careers are low-paying, undesirable work environments with few career opportunities” Carrick says. “Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Today’s modern manufacturing involves working with the most advanced technologies and systems in the world to create amazing products” he adds.

Highly transferable skills

In Georgia, the Coweta County School System partnered with local manufacturers to launch a three-year apprentice program. The initiative included Georgia Technical College, which introduced industrial maintenance and machine tooling courses.

“The question came up, ‘What can we as a school system do for you as a company?'” says Martin Pleyer, COO of Grenzebach Corp., a high-tech manufacturing firm that produces machinery used in the creation of glass and building material. “I grasped that opportunity���my dream was, could we establish a German apprenticeship here?”

Leaders in the district, located about 40 miles southwest of Atlanta, worked with Grenzebach officials to design a program based on one already used by the company in Germany.

Three-quarters of the time, students complete hands-on training���with sophomores, juniors and seniors working on projects that teach them specific skills, such as tool handling or metalworking. Students spend the remaining time on classroom lessons, such as learning how different metals react in different situations.

State lawmakers even had to pass a bill to allow the flexible schedule, says Superintendent Steve Barker.

During the apprenticeship, students might design and build a small race car, for example, as opposed to working on projects the company would bring to market.

Instead of periodic testing, students take a midterm and final exam (that count for about 80 percent of their grade) to demonstrate the skills they’ve acquired. Grenzebach supplied a trainer to guide staff in developing the local program.

About 10 students started the apprenticeship program���which expanded to eight different companies in the area���creating a small cohort and rigorous curriculum.

The companies are part of a local manufacturing consortium; some have headquarters in Japan and Canada, as well as Germany and the United States. Students earn $8 per hour their first year, $10 their second and $12 their third.

“One of the misconceptions ������其 is the notion that when you do a program like this, a student can only work with that one company” says Mark Whitlock, CEO of the Central Education Center, a college and career charter school run by the Coweta County School System.

“Students aren’t restricted to one company; they can go anywhere when they get those skills.”

Wading into the work environment

Pinellas County Schools on Florida’s west coast has a pre-apprentice program, part of an effort to coordinate internships with local manufacturers in three nearby counties. More than 1,000 manufacturers operate in Pinellas County, and the majority are smaller firms that employ 50 people or less.

Through the American Manufacturing Skills Initiative���an industry-led economic and workforce development initiative also known as AMskills���high school students can participate in a pre-apprenticeship program, and graduates can take part in a full-time apprenticeship.

Students start with a summer internship, which begins as unpaid but becomes paid if the employer sees a good fit. After the program, which includes classwork, high school graduates can move to full-time work as a second-year apprentice.

“The idea is that high school students would get acquainted with the work environment, learn what’s going on, and continue their studies in high school and then engage in the full internship program” says Mark Hunt, executive director of Pinellas’ career and technical adult education.

Among the challenges, Pinellas and other districts faced manufacturing companies reluctant to hire anyone under the age of 18. However, labor laws allow them to hire 16-year-olds who participate in an educational program, which includes instruction in safety and proper tool handling.

“These students have more safety knowledge and more training at 17 years old than an adult who just walks in and applies for a job off the street” he says.

Students find a purpose

In Hamilton County, Tennessee, 26 juniors spent the 2016-17 school year at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga.

They took English, math and other core courses online from a classroom at the factory, and spent time learning how to fix and operate advanced manufacturing equipment���an in-demand, “jack-of-all-trades” discipline called “mechatronics” says David Cowan, Hamilton County schools’ director of career and technical education.

“We intentionally selected kids who shine when they get their hands on a piece of equipment and can work with it, as opposed to the valedictorian or a star in English or math” Cowan says.

The district developed its Mechatronics Akademie in tandem with Chattanooga State Community College, which wanted to boost enrollment in the career technology programs that it operates at the Volkswagen plant.

The district bases two teachers and all the learning at the plant so students don’t have to travel back and forth to their home schools. They can, however, join athletic teams and participate in artistic performances and other activities at those schools.

The students will also take college-level courses in welding, math for engineering, industrial safety and other subjects.

The post Schools equip students for factory jobs in new economy appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

The school now has 80 students in manufacturing, advanced manufacturing and robotics programs, and is working with other organizations and a nearby college to develop a regionally recognized certificate.

“We are creating an employer-driven program for both adults and students, focusing on economic outcomes and the talent pipeline” Superintendent Jeremy Gulley says.

Students can earn college credit, and the program takes the added step of bringing parents to local companies, which helps break down misconceptions about manufacturing.

“What many parents don’t understand is what advanced manufacturing looks like today” Gulley says. “Before, it was dirty, dingy, rote and boring. Now it’s a clean environment based on problem-solving.”

Grant money also funds a part-time career advocate who has placed at least 18 Jay district students in internships.

Palm Beach Schools in Florida operates a high-tech manufacturing program, thanks to a partnership with the sugar industry, which uses automated equipment in processing plants.

The district is reopening West Tech in August, a small alternative high school serving Belle Glade, a community near Lake Okeechobee where unemployment hovers near 30 percent. The state contributed $1.4 million to renovate West Tech, and $10 million from sales tax will pay for computer labs and other equipment.

Students will finish the program with industry certifications.

The programs include mechatronics, a multidisciplinary field in which students learn to fix a range of modern manufacturing equipment. Mechatronics jobs pay a median wage of nearly $96,000 a year.

But it can be difficult to lure qualified teachers away from industry jobs, says Peter Licata, director of choice and career options for Palm Beach Schools. “It’s hard to find a teacher who will take a 50 percent pay cut” he says. “We really need to rethink what we pay.”

The post Schools match skills to local economic needs appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

Some districts are piloting seat belts on a handful of buses, while others are taking steps to outfit their entire fleet.

But there’s no federal mandate. Six states require seat belts on school buses, but only California meets the NHTSA recommendation. The agency has been weighing whether to mandate belts on buses for four decades. Industry experts say that’s because school buses are already one of the safest forms of transportation, thanks to cushioned seats that protect students in a crash.

In New Hanover County Schools in North Carolina, administrators in 2016 added seat belts to five of their 163 buses as part of a state study.

Buses, which transport 23.5 million children to school and activities each year across the nation, travel more than 4.3 billion miles per year. While it’s the safest mode of transportation for school children, about six people are killed each year while riding a school bus, according to national NHTSA data.

“You still know that if you’re in the seat belt, it increases the safety percentage just a little bit more” says Ken Nance, director of transportation in New Hanover County.

Better-behaved students

When students board buses in New Hanover County, bus drivers will walk through the aisle to check belts before pulling away from the school. And drivers can check their rearview mirror to ensure students haven’t removed lap and shoulder belts.

Bus drivers have noticed that seat belts have seemingly improved student behavior���they’re not jumping between seats, standing up or leaning into the aisle, which could cause more serious injuries in a crash. Plus, drivers can better focus on the road. However, despite those benefits, middle and high school students tend to resist using seat belts, Nance says.

Better technology has made the belts lighter. The buckles are close to the seat’s crease instead of at the end of the belt, decreasing the likelihood of students swinging and hitting other kids with them. The belts, which automatically retract, also extend to accommodate different size children, so either two larger students or three smaller ones can fit per seat.

Allocating funding

The cost of installing seat belts is a major concern for districts. “They would prefer to have seat belts on buses, but there are very few who can actually fund them” says Todd Steele, vice president of business development and growth at First Student, the largest school transportation company in North America.

In some cases, state lawmakers have mandated belts, but districts haven’t added them because funding hasn’t been allocated. Older buses weren’t designed for seat belts, Steele says. It can cost up to $30,000 to outfit an old, traditional, long yellow bus with belts.

Estimates for adding seat belts to new buses range from $8,000 to $15,000, which can still be a substantial investment���up to 20 percent of the bus’s cost. For New Hanover, the cost has been absorbed by the state, which pays to replace existing school buses.

Liability questions

The National Association for Pupil Transportation and the National School Transportation Association encourage districts to discuss liability when considering seat belts, but refrain from offering legal advice. That includes legal questions such as whether districts are responsible if a student is injured after failing to use a seat belt. The two associations also encourage school leaders to be prepared for questions about seat belts, especially in a bus crash that does not include them.

New Hanover plans to continue its seat belt program, and next year will add 14 new buses with seat belts to its fleet. “It’s not just (protection during) accidents” Nance says. “It’s the prevention, by students being in their seats, of not being a distraction to the bus driver.

The post Strapping in students on buses gains some speed with schools appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

For instance, leaders had concluded the textbooks they purchased didn’t adequately teach fractions and integers, leading to gaps in student learning. Grandview spent about $200,000 to hire English and math consultants to help the district’s instruction coaches write their own units. The goal was to better align instruction with students’ academic abilities.

The district updated the homegrown curriculum each year with feedback from teachers. Plus, as student ability improved each year, the educators created more rigorous assignments, such as comparative essays.

“The degree in which they were expected to perform increased” says Wilma Kozai, who retired from her position as assistant superintendent of teaching and learning. “There’s no doubt that it worked.”

As online resources and 1-to-1 initiatives become more easily accessible, schools are beginning to replace or supplement textbooks with their own material or resources created by educators elsewhere.

Some districts lean heavily on state-funded programs such as Engage NY, which provides free resources. Others have turned to sites such as TeachersPayTeachers, where educators sell curricular materials.

Surge in sharing

Located about three hours southeast of Seattle, the Grandview district began revamping its K12 math and English curriculum four years ago, pulling together information from books or articles it has permission to use.

And it has made a difference: Only 13 percent of sophomores were proficient four years ago. The passing rates improved each year, reaching 64 percent in 2014.

Mike Closner, Grandview’s executive director of teaching and learning, says teachers can more easily customize content when it has been created within the district. “As our kids have grown in their ability, we have been able to increase the depth” he says.

Grandview now shares its curriculum with other districts as open educational resources, also known as OER. The district received OER grants from Washington’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, totaling $25,000 over two years. This pays staff to review materials to ensure they comply with copyright rules, including proper attribution and getting an author’s permission.

Doing so allows other districts to use such content without infringing copyright, and is part of the federal #GoOpen movement launched last year. Schools or states share materials through an open license, and encourage other district leaders to do the same.

More than 60 districts and 15 states have pledged to share content they have created. And, the education department set up Learning Registry, a digital catalog of over 100,000 open-license materials with contributions from a variety of federal resources and individual districts.

For-profit companies have also entered the arena of educator-created curricular materials, allowing teachers to publish and sell their lessons to other educators across the country.

Most notable is TeachersPayTeachers, which says it has four million active members and hosts a collection of two million lesson plans and other resources. And earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to launch Inspire, its own marketplace of curricular resources that will include contributions from educators.

‘A little more freedom’

When Principal Ron Farrow at Franklin Elementary School in Missouri introduced a new response-to-intervention process to improve student skills, teachers felt overwhelmed from the intensive workload of creating curriculum from scratch. Teachers at the K4 building in the Cape Girardeau Public Schools suggested using resources that they had seen on TeachersPayTeachers.

The online marketplace allows teachers to purchase or sell a host of original classroom material, including lesson plans, activities, games, Common Core resources and classroom decor.

The service is free to join, and materials are crowd-sourced with a four-point rating scale in areas such as quality, practicality, thoroughness and clarity. In addition, users can submit comments about the success of the material. Typically, the most popular resources rise to the top.

Now, Franklin teachers use these lessons regularly during 40-minute small group sessions in which students at similar levels work on a certain skill. For example, one teacher purchased a phonics game from TeachersPayTeachers that engaged her students in the subject.

TeachersPayTeachers resources have led to improvement. When first-graders worked on the reading skill of decoding words, proficiency in that specific skill increased from 76 to 85 percent in two weeks, Farrow says.

He reviews and approves each TeachersPayTeachers resource before purchase, and discusses the materials and their effectiveness with the school’s leadership team (which includes teachers from each grade level, an elective teacher and a special education teacher).

Costs have varied, from a $3.50 kit that includes “real-world” long-division problems about a movie theater, for example, to $10 tracking binders that provide charts where students can watch their own improvement.

Farrow budgeted $200 per grade level for teachers to use the site in the 2015-16 school year, or about $1,000 in sum total. That increased to $100 per teacher for the 2016-17 school year, totaling almost $1,500. “It really became a valuable resource” Farrow says. “It was a good fit for what we wanted, and it gives teachers a little more freedom.”

Challenges and solutions

In 2014-15, seeking to save money, the small Upper Perkiomen School District in Pennsylvania started revamping the elementary math curriculum in lieu of purchasing new textbooks.

Teachers then worked in grade-level and subject committees to gather resources, starting with Pennsylvania Learns, a free online resource from the state education department.

But soon, the team hit a roadblock when it was unable to pull together the encompassing, step-by-step curriculum it had initially envisioned. Concerned that students would face gaps in their learning, administrators ended up buying a textbook.

“Because we were one of the first ones, there weren’t as many resources as we thought there would be” says A.J. Juliani, Upper Perkiomen’s education and technology innovation specialist. “We had to backtrack.”

But the district has had other successes, including pulling together new material for an integrated science system course that is required for ninth-graders. It introduces students to biology, chemistry and physical science.

In the past, the Upper Perkiomen district purchased books and resources in all three subjects. To create their own materials, teachers relied heavily on the CK-12 Foundation, an online library of free textbooks, videos and lessons.

By creating its own curriculum, the district over the past two years saved at least $300,000 in textbook purchases, and redirected about $20,000 to other initiatives, including a 1-to-1 Chromebook initiative for all students.

The school is now one of six education department #GoOpen ambassadors that took early steps to implement and share open educational resources, and that have pledged to help mentor other districts.

Mackenzie Ryan is a freelance writer in Iowa.

The post Create your own school curriculum appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

The Lafayette Parish School System in Louisiana used to restrict internet access, only granting certain streaming websites to teachers by request. For example, music teachers would be the only ones with access to streaming music���locking out others in the district. And during state testing, schools would disable streaming to ensure exams were not affected.

But thanks to 2015 rule changes in the FCC’s E-Rate program, which gives discounts to schools and libraries for internet upgrades, that will change this fall.

Located an hour from the Gulf of Mexico, Lafayette is a hub for offshore drilling companies. But when oil prices took a dive, the board didn’t believe voters would support an infrastructure tax.

So the district applied for E-Rate funds, which gives discounts on campus infrastructure, such as Wi-Fi connections for classrooms.

With nearly 70 percent of the district’s 31,000 students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch, Lafayette received an 80 percent discount on $3.5 million, the total cost of upgrades. “I would not be able to accomplish this without E-Rate funds” says LaShona Dickerson, district technology director.

Outfitting individual classrooms with wireless access points can range from $150,000 for an elementary school to $300,000 for a high school. Costs also depend on size and infrastructure.

Across the nation, more than $1 billion in campus wireless access points were sought through the program for the 2016-17 school year.

“It doesn’t matter how fast a connection is to the school’s front door if they can’t bring that high-speed internet all the way to the classroom or the library” says John Harrington, CEO of Funds For Learning, an E-Rate compliance services firm.

1-to-1, testing needs

In Lafayette, upgrades were necessary for a 1-to-1 initiative that, by 2020, will give Chromebooks and iPads to all students in the district’s 42 schools. “It allows us to create personalized learning opportunities for students” Dickerson says.

The E-Rate program also paid for additional bandwidth, helping Lafayette prepare for the statewide move to online standardized testing that requires more devices, she says.

“This upgrade is a huge improvement for us” Dickerson says. “Now we can empower all teachers without putting them through the red tape for permissions.”

E-Rate discounts range from 20 percent to 90 percent, based on the school’s economic need; the average is 74 percent. Applicants typically receive funding as long as proper protocols are followed, such as completing competitive bids for installation or upgrade work, Harrington says.

About 60 percent use consultants to help navigate the process.

The post New E-Rate savings bring speedy internet to more students appeared first on District 91心頭istration.