Tech Trains for Ready Employment; Imparts Passion for Career Skills

CREST HAVEN – As a Nor’easter brought heavy rain, wind and chilly temperatures, the parking lot at the Cape May County Technical School District continued to fill.
A Nov. 15 open house was not diminished by the weather as parents, and their high-school-age children sought information about career-oriented secondary education.
The 50th annual 2018 PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes toward Public Education found that the majority of Americans felt that job preparation was “particularly weak” in the country’s public high schools.
Cape May County Technical School, Capetech for short, directly addresses that issue through a combined academic and career-focused program that meets all state requirements for high school graduation and provides its graduates with ground training and experience, and often a national credential, in a specific career pathway.
The Technical High School has an enrollment of between 610 and 650 students each year with a waiting list for those who didn’t make the cut off for admission.
Offering a full slate of academic programs necessary for graduation and college preparation, the school caps those programs with a three-year curriculum in one of 21 career technical pathways. The school is open to all county residents.
The Career Technical Programs (CTE) vary from Advertising Design to Agriscience, from Culinary Arts to Cosmetology or from a focus on Travel and Tourism to one dealing with Sustainable Energies.
Each day students devote two hours to their career focus along with the Math, English, and Science that dominate most traditional high school learning experiences.
The 21 different programs are often linked in ways that reflect an educational ecosystem in which interaction is prized. 
The Culinary Arts Program runs a café where menus are designed by students in the Advertising and Design program. At specific times of the year, that menu may contain the offer of Fishy Friday when tilapia, raised as part of a school biology aquaculture project, is served to patrons.
The fish live off of worm farms supplied with compost materials from Culinary Arts and other programs.
The nesting of the programs almost creates a mini-economy of mutual dependence, so there are real-world consequences to poor performance. Not enough compost means smaller worm farms which means less fish food which means no Fishy Friday in the café. 
The school seems to abound in these types of interactions among otherwise distinct programs.
The Early Childhood Development Program students work on the preparation of teaching modules then open a door from their classroom to use them in the school pre-k program.
The development of the teaching plan is no longer a subjective judgment. It is put to the test with actual 4-year-olds eager to learn.
On a practical side, these programs are aligned with certifications and licensing exams.
Graduates from a welding program will have a certification that makes them immediately employable. The same is true for graduates of automotive mechanics, the HVAC-R program and others.
Those programs that require state license testing direct efforts at preparing students for the exams.
Many students immediately join their career workforce after graduation, deferring while they seek a post-secondary degree. Even here the programs available may offer attractive options.
One program through Ford Motor Company allows students who graduate from the automotive mechanics pathway to join Ford’s Asset Program which includes paid jobs through co-op periods at dealerships that are alternated with a period of enrollment in a college program.
All ninth-grade students enter the work world with 21 pathways through career exploratory classes where they are exposed to a range of career options, participating in each one to gain insights that help in making the 10th-grade decision on a career path to focus on for a three-year period. The introduction of the career exploratory classes has significantly reduced situations where students start a career pathway and then decide it is not for them.
That exploration occurs before the decisions are made.
A general concern with career readiness of public high school graduates persists in American public opinion. Numerous polls show that to be true. 
Some fear that college preparation demands such attention that career education does not get the resources or the focus it needs.
The state maintains a list of 16 career clusters important for workforce development associated with 79 career pathways. A subset of those is contained in the 21 career programs at Capetech.
Resources and specially laid out space are key to this form of education. The non-county high schools have initiated academies that allow for focused instruction in career-oriented program areas to meet the same concern for career readiness.
Links to post-secondary institutions also play an important role allowing college credit articulation programs providing students with a leg up on the pursuit of a college degree.
All the links and the strategies are not yet in place. Many students in the county are still arriving at post-secondary institutions with a need for remedial work.
A seasonally-dominated economy with high off-season unemployment is still the norm. Apprenticeship programs are still underfunded.
The county’s only post-secondary institution continues to lose enrollment.
Capetech highlighted models of career education that can engage and train students, giving them employment skills and a passion to keep those skills current. 
The following Career Technical Programs are taught at Cape May County Technical School:
1.    Career Exploratory
2.    Advertising Design and Commercial Arts
3.    Agriscience and Horticulture
4.    Automotive Mechanics
5.    Carpentry and Property Management
6.    Computer and Information Technology
7.    Culinary Arts
8.    Cosmetology
9.    Communication Arts
10.    Commercial Food Production
11.    Early Childhood Development
12.    Entertainment Production Technology
13.    Entrepreneurship
14.    HVAC-R Sustainable Energies
15.    Law Enforcement and Public Safety
16.    Natural Science
17.    Pre-Engineering
18.    Pastry and Baking
19.    Small Engine and Light Diesel
20.    Travel and Tourism
21.    Welding
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.