Once again, winter is here.  And, as you may have seen from the recent press release and eCard, planning for Job Shadow Day 2004 is underway!  This year, the Job Shadow initiative will officially kick off on Monday, February 2nd, 2004!

Job Shadow Day is the start of a year-round effort that gives young people a chance to see various occupations up close by shadowing "career mentors" in the workplace.  This year the Job Shadow Coalition, consisting of Junior Achievement, America's Promise - The Alliance for Youth, and the U.S. Department of Labor, anticipate that more than one million young people will job shadow during the course of 2004 as a result of this effort.

"Job Shadow Day gives many young people their first real glimpse at the world of work," says Stuart Shapiro, Executive Director of the Job Shadow Coalition.  "As for adults, it can serve as an introduction to the mentoring experience.  This makes Job Shadowing a rewarding experience for both the student and for the volunteer."

Materials

If you are planning to participate in Job Shadow Day, there are many resources available at the jobshadow.org website.  The website and materials on it have been updated and are ready to be used.  The download center for the "How-To Guide" and other materials can be accessed directly at:  http://www.jobshadow.org/get_started/download.php?file=getstart_pdfs.

Other materials available on the download center include a Brochure/Poster, a postcard, and web-ready banners.  Additionally, if you prefer a hard copy of the How-To Guide or Brochure/Poster, you can place an order with the fulfillment house by calling 800-373-3174.  Finally, the download center has other materials you may find useful.  These include "Frequently Asked Questions," sample e-mails, sample press releases, and newsletter stories.

Share your Success!

Over the next few months the U.S. Department of Labor will be sending these E-Xtra Newsletters to nearly 10,000 Job Shadow supporters.  They are always looking for good success stories or new ideas to share.  If you have some innovative approaches or a great initiative or consideration in the newsletter, please e-mail the details to press@jobshadow.org.

Extra! Extra! Extra!

HogQuest:  A New Jobshadow.org Contest!

Keep your eyes peeled for hidden “career hogs!”  The Job Shadow Coalition is launching a new interactive “Scavenger Hunt” called “HogQuest.”  Visit www.jobshadow.org/hogquest.html, solve the riddle and enter for your chance to receive a $25 gift certificate from Amazon.com.  There will be six opportunities to win until February 2nd 2004!  Virtually anyone can enter, so share with your friends, colleagues, volunteers and students!

Job Shadow Merchandise Now Available at Jobshadow.org! 

A whole array of Job Shadow Day merchandise is now available at www.jobshadow.org T-shirts start at $9.95 each!  Banners, pens, flyers, sports bottles and mouse pads can also be purchased online.  If you would like to participate in the group order (lower minimums and lower prices), please place your order by December 26th.  Individual orders can be placed anytime.  Allow 3-4 weeks for delivery.  Order your JSD merchandise now!

Job Shadow Poll – Girls Less Interested in Public Service Careers than Boys

A new poll from the Job Shadow Coalition and Harris Interactive shows that nearly half (46%) of girls between the ages of 13 and 18 have “Never Considered” a career in  politics or government service, nearly double the rate of boys (29%).  In addition, twice as many boys (18%) as girls (9%) said they were “More Likely” to consider politics or government service careers because of events since 9/11.   

The Federal government is the nation’s largest employer.  However, according to the Government Accounting Office (GAO) about one-third of the Federal workforce will be eligible to retire by 2005.  This has raised concerns of an impending government workforce shortage and focused on the need to attract young and diverse people to public service.

On the defense front, a majority of girls (57%) said they have “Never Considered” a career in the military, compared to about a third (35%) of boys.  Since 9/11, nearly twice as many boys (17%) as girls (9%) said they are “More Likely” to consider careers in the military.  As far as being less motivated by recent events, one-in-ten boys (10%) said they were “Less Likely” to consider careers in politics or government service because of events since 9/11, while one-in-twenty girls (6%) concurred.  The percentages were about the same for military careers; boys (10%), girls (7%).  To see the full poll results, visit www.jobshadow.org/pollresult.pdf.

Virtual Job Shadow

Initial response to the new Virtual Job Shadow site has been tremendous!  To find out how you can use Virtual Job Shadow as a supplement to your Job Shadow Day activities, or as a stand-alone program, go to www.jobshadow.org and click the “See Your Future” icon!

A Word for Our Sponsors!

Once again, Job Shadow Day is supported by national co-sponsors Monster and News Corporation! 

~~~~>  Youth Programs for Ages Between 14 to 21

The South Florida Workforce assists at-risk youth ages 14-21 to continue their education and training in order to advance their skills and pursue the best job possible. In-school and out-of-school programs are run through Youth Opportunity Centers and select schools offering the "Stay-in-School" Program.

In-School programs

The Stay-in-School provides participating students with counseling, tutoring and leadership activities, social service referrals, part-time jobs and many other resources that remedy the factor that put them at risk. Students are identified for the program by their School Counselor as early as 9th grade. The Stay-in School Program is available through participating high schools.

Out-of-School Programs

Youth Opportunity Centers assist young people who have either dropped out of school or have graduated from high school but are in need help finding a job, training to prepare for the workplace, or exploring career paths. These centers provide youths with a variety of options from returning to school or obtaining a high school equivalency diploma (GED), to entering a short-term training or an apprenticeship program.

One–Stop Career Center

One-Stop Career Centers offer youth job postings and referrals, resume writing tools, interest and aptitude tests, financial aid information, interview and job preparation tools, GED study classes and materials and many other resources.

Job Corps

Job Corps is the nation's largest and most comprehensive residential and non-residential education and career training program for youth, ages 16 through 24. Job Corps provides career services for job placement upon completion of the program.

For more information on all these programs, please logon to:  http://www.southfloridaworkforce.com/youth.htm

~~~~>  GM Steers Employees to Youth Service
 

It's all the rage. National think tanks and trade publications tout partnerships between private and public entities as a win-win situation. In fact, many Schools and Communities of Promise have benefited from or have been initiated by-such partnerships. However, with purse strings tighter than they have been in the past, community collaborations must look at corporate giving in a different light. And, corporate sponsors must challenge themselves to examine how their existing resources can fulfill the Five Promises for youth in ways that may not have occurred to them before.

Consequently, Communities of Promise have come to rely on the ingenuity of their leadership and that of local businesses to identify these untapped corporate resources and connect them to children and youth. One example is a recent partnership formed by General Motors <http://www.gm.com/> (GM) and United Auto Workers' Capital Area, Michigan chapter (UAW Local 652) with the Michigan Education Association. In this fruitful partnership, 50 GM workers employed through UAW Local 652 serve as volunteers in a program called Project TEAM (Teach, Encourage, Assist, and Mentor). Five days a week, the volunteers assist at Sites of Promise-primarily public elementary schools throughout the Lansing School District. They serve as mentors, tutors, principal assistants and support staff for after-school programs.

How did the Lansing School District luck out in receiving such an essential resource? In a recent contract negotiation with UAW Local 652, GM agreed to renew its commitment to protect skilled trade employees for an additional period of time. According the contract, if a skilled worker is laid off due to lack of work, GM will continue to pay them as if they were working full-time. This arrangement has left several employees with extra time to spend at their leisure, or serving the community. Jerry King, the chairperson of the Community Service Activities and Consumer Affairs for UAW Local 652, recommended that Project TEAM be offered as a company service project. Generously, GM agreed.  Now the world's largest vehicle manufacturer promotes the program as a meaningful alternative for workers who are laid off. Fortunately, many have signed on as volunteers and, as a result, many schoolchildren are receiving the one-on-one attention they need to thrive academically and socially. In addition, GM and UAW have launched an awareness campaign with the slogan, "From laid-off to hands-on." The campaign is designed to increase participation in the community service program and encourage other corporations to offer a similar opportunity to their employees.

"There's no limit to how far we can go to meet the needs of our children," said King, referring to the growing number of volunteers and organizations involved with Project TEAM. "It takes multiple partnerships to make this work."

How can your Community of Promise initiate a similar arrangement? The answer lies within-within your network, that is. King is not only the chairperson of the Community Service Activities and Consumer Affairs for UAW Local 652; he is also a community champion. King is president of the board of directors for the Capital Area Youth Alliance, which houses Capital Area's Promise <http://www.capitalareaspromise.org/> in Michigan.

So, when brainstorming for resources, look to your board members, steering committee members, volunteers and supporters of your local alliance for ideas and valuable contacts. You may find that although your Community of Promise's financial needs are great, it also has its hidden riches right under your nose...awaiting your discovery.

For more information on the GM-UAW Local 652 partnership, contact Joel Milgram, Executive Director of Capital Area Youth Alliance at Youthalliance@acd.net

~~~~>  Need a Safe Place?
    

November 2003 marks the 20th year anniversary of Project Safe Place.  Project Safe Place provides access to immediate help and support resources for young people in crisis through a network of sites sustained by qualified agencies, trained volunteers and businesses.  If your community does not currently have Safe Places for youth and you would like information on how to start a Safe Place program, contact YMCA National Safe Place by calling 502-635-3660, email nationalsafeplace@ymcalouisville.org or for more information on Project Safe Place visit www.safeplaceservices.org

Articles of Interest

~~~~>  Learning by Doing, Eating, Touring

By Amanda Angel
Sun Staff
December 7, 2003

Language: A teacher looks into the community for ways to improve her students' German skills.

Harford Christian School senior Amanda Seymour says that she can identify a German accent pretty easily these days.

That's because she's had a lot of practice.

"I can usually tell if someone has a German accent," said Seymour, who has been studying the German language since she was in the ninth grade. "I let them know that I've been taking German at school."

When she strikes up a conversation with natives of Germany, she winds up inviting them to the school's annual Kaffee und Kuchen ("coffee and cake"), an event started by her language teacher, Peggy Nickson.

Nickson and her students frequently invite German natives from the area to participate in the school's language program. Seymour, who also is senior class president, believes that two or three of the Germans she has met came to Kaffee und Kuchen.

"We search them out," Nickson said. "If I hear a German accent anywhere in town I corner them and invite them to our Kaffee und Kuchen."

During her six years teaching at Harford Christian in Dublin, Nickson has cultivated a small community of German speakers - mostly women - who attend school events. Several also substitute for Nickson when she's not in class and others offer to sponsor field trips for the students. Recently, the third and fourth year students in the German program were invited on a tour of a Pennsylvania dairy farm.

Kerstin Otte of Brogue, Pa., first read about the school's Kaffee und Kuchen in a local newspaper. Otte, her husband, Thomas, and their four children emigrated from Germany about a year ago and settled in the area. Thomas Otte works at Hope Acres dairy farm and the Brown Cow, the farm's store.

Employees at the dairy farm give tours of the fully automated facility. For Harford Christian students, Kerstin Otte gave the tour in German. She explained in her native language how the automated milking and herding processes work and answered questions as students practiced their German skills.

"I talked to the manager and she gave me the text of what she said in her tours," Otte said. She said she then translated it into German and sent Nickson a list of the vocabulary words she would be using. Otte wanted the students to understand what she was saying, so she sent words such as cow, robot and grain.

Senior Sarah Swehla, 17, a fourth-year German student, said it is beneficial to speak with German natives as well as with her teacher. She said the native Germans teach the students idioms and help them improve their conversational skills.

"When Frau Nickson talks to us, she sometimes helps us with the language. A native speaker talks as they would normally speak in German," she said.

Nickson began teaching at the Harford Christian School in 1998 after moving to Harford County. She formerly taught German at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., and at the University of South Carolina in Spartanburg.

Sabine Smith heard about Nickson's German program from her son's baby sitter, who sends her children to the Harford Christian School. Smith, a native of Fulda, Germany, has attended the Kaffee und Kuchen where she was introduced to other native Germans living in the area.

Smith left Germany in 1985. She lives with her husband and two sons in Hickory. After attending the Kaffee und Kuchen, she started volunteering during the summer with the school's language camp.

"It's nice of Peggy to get all of us together and get us to talk," Smith said of the local German community. "At the coffee and cake, I met maybe 10 women so far."

Otte, Smith and other native Germans bring more to Harford Christian School than their language. Both Swehla and Seymour, who said they would like to continue to study German in college, said the native speakers, teach students about German culture and history. The school begins its German program in ninth grade.

"There are probably four different people who come in to substitute and we hear stories about when they lived in Germany," Swehla said. "One of them even told us about the Holocaust."

Nickson is organizing a trip to Germany this summer for her students. For the time being, she tries to expose them to German culture through field trips, substitutes and Kaffee und Kuchen.

"If you can get the students into a social-linguistic situation when they are speaking German with a native, they learn so much more," Nickson said.

~~~~>  Kindergartners Reading Better

By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 2, 2003; Page B01

Montgomery Credits Full-Day Classes, Improved Curriculum

The percentage of Montgomery County kindergarten students who can read and comprehend a simple story has nearly doubled in three years, according to a school system study to be released today.

The most significant gains, county officials said, were among lower-income students in the full-day kindergarten program. For the first time, those students outperformed their peers in half-day kindergarten at schools that have fewer economically disadvantaged children.

African American and Hispanic children in particular showed marked improvement in reading. The study found that 69 percent of Hispanic students at 17 high-poverty schools that have offered full-day kindergarten for three years reached a "text reading benchmark" last school year, up from 33 percent in spring 2001.

The percentage of African American students in all-day kindergarten who reached the benchmark nearly equaled the percentage of white students -- 72 percent, compared with 79 percent. Yet whites and Asians still outscored African American and Hispanic students, and Montgomery County Superintendent Jerry D. Weast cautioned that more needs to be done to close that achievement gap.

"We're not there yet, but we're well underway," Weast said yesterday.

The school district used an in-house evaluation to measure whether the kindergarten students could read and demonstrate understanding of simple texts. Weast said that increasing the number of hours children spend in kindergarten was not solely responsible for the gains. The district revamped its entire kindergarten program to include more teacher training, revise the curriculum and shrink class sizes, he said.

The study comes at a time when Maryland is requiring full-day kindergarten in all 24 of its public school systems by 2007. Some Virginia schools offer full-day kindergarten, but the state has no plans to make it mandatory. D.C. public schools have been offering full-day kindergarten classes since the 1950s.

Other area school systems with full-day kindergarten programs have not released such extensive progress reports. In the District, officials said they believe their all-day kindergarten programs are improving reading skills but could not cite any test data on effectiveness. In Prince George's County, second-graders -- the county's first full-day kindergarten group two years ago -- posted gains this year on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, a national exam.

Montgomery County began phasing in its full-day program three years ago while also strengthening its regular kindergarten classes. As a result, Weast said, 70 percent of all kindergarten students in the last school year met or exceeded the text reading benchmark, compared with 39 percent in 2001.

The school district offers full-day kindergarten at 56 schools and plans to add classes to 17 more next fall. Weast said he also wants to strengthen the preschool program: Next week, he will propose spending about $655,000 to open up 250 more preschool slots.

Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) said he supports the early childhood efforts. "It's going to have a huge impact for us years down the road," Duncan said. "Our [school] system is a lot more diverse than it used to be."

A year ago, the school system released a study showing that its kindergarten students were able to demonstrate fundamental skills, such as recognizing letters and identifying simple words, in greater numbers. At the time, officials said students were on track to read fluently by the end of third grade.

Carmen van Zutphen, the principal of Bel Pre Elementary School in Silver Spring, said she already has fluent readers in the second grade who were in the school's full-day kindergarten program when it began in 2001. At Bel Pre, where the majority of students are African American and Hispanic, nine all-day kindergarten classes are offered, with student-to-teacher ratios of 15 to 1. Van Zutphen said her kindergarten students aren't just reading; they're writing, too.

"We do see sentences; we do see a page full of writing," she said. "We do see children putting out their words and their thoughts on paper, as well as being able to speak and read at a higher level than ever before."

~~~~>  Superior Science Education at Zero Cost

By John O. Andersen

Perhaps you're a parent looking into supplemental camps or classes for your children. Maybe you'd like to get back into science yourself.  If you're like many people, the cost of science instruction, whether a camp, class, or college tuition, could be too much for your budget. But never fear. There is a zero cost way to learn about science.

Become a science museum volunteer!

In the USA, we have scores of science museums. If there isn't one in your local community, there's probably one a short drive away. The largest science museum in our area offers a wide range of opportunities for volunteers to increase their knowledge of science and have fun at the same time. I suspect other museums would have similar options.

Here are just a few:

1)  If the museum has hands-on labs (i.e., chemistry, physics, paleontology, computer, or life science), you could work in them. You may perform experiments for the public, and assist visitors in conducting their own experiments. If you're outgoing and friendly, this option could give you many teaching opportunities.

2)  Be an interpreter and demonstrator in the changing exhibits hall. With three different exhibits each year, this could be like taking several college courses, only without the tests and lectures, and of course, tuition. If you're like me, the chance to teach visitors what you've learned helps cement it in your brain.

3)  Be a tour guide for unique attractions. Our local museum has a decommissioned navy submarine. There is an ongoing need for volunteer tour guides on the boat. What a great way for a person to learn about submarines, and rub shoulders with the people who've actually lived and worked in them. Similarly, many other museums have unique attractions which provide opportunities for enthusiastic volunteer tour guides.

4)  Assist with museum outreach programs such as traveling exhibits and summer camps.                         

5)  Become a part of the exhibit design and building team.

These are just a few of the ways a museum volunteer might learn about science. I like to think that a person with the right combination of enthusiasm, curiosity, and self-confidence, could use the volunteer option as their primary vehicle to becoming a full-fledged science whiz.

Oh, on the cost: I lied a little.  Being a volunteer won't cost you money, but it will cost you some of your spare time. Speaking for myself, I don't mind giving up a few hours of spare time each month in exchange for loads of intellectual stimulation, and what could very well be a superior science education.

For more information, go to:  http://hometown.aol.com/brightkidsrus/zerocostscienceeducation.html
 

LAP is a 15-lesson curriculum for high school students, apprentices, new entrants into the workforce, union members, etc. It aims to familiarize students with the world of work and the labor organizations that represent workers.  Hats off to Judy Ancel and the University of Missouri’s Labor Studies Center for making a difference with this new program.
http://www.umkc.edu/labor-ed/lap/index.htm.

To learn more about the Teamsters, a vital part of every community in the U.S. and Canada and our School-to-Career network, please log onto http://edu.teamster.org/edu.asp or http://www.ibtstw.org

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