June 2005 Edition of the Skills for Tomorrow Activities and Updates Listserv

As students graduate and move on to their next phase in life, let’s make sure they are equipped with the necessary information to make wise career choices. Tell them how important union membership is to their lives. Tell them how important it is to have rights on the job and using a collective voice to express concerns is a way to ensure fairness in the workplace.

Host a student at your organization this summer. Some students are able to participate in an internship for class credit rather then compensation. Others may require a minimal payment. If you are able to expose a young person to your organization, please do so as you will be helping to prepare a young adult for the world of work.

To submit information on your organization, or career development curriculum, please email Sharlene Mentor at smentor@teamster.org

Thank you!

Education Department Staff
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)
http://www.ibtstw.org

On May 16th, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) took part in the 5th Annual Labor 2 Youth Fair hosted by the D.C. Metropolitan Council at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington D.C.

The fair attracted more than 325 high school students who learned about unions, union careers, training opportunities, employers, and the labor movement. The Teamsters’ exhibit featured information on good union jobs in growth industries.

The event included more than 38 labor organizations that provided exhibits to help Washington, D.C. metropolitan area students learn about the labor movement.

For the fifth consecutive year, IBT Education Department staff members Sharlene Mentor and Nayhema Fitzworme hosted the International's exhibit. Local 96's Recording Secretary Phil Alter hosted their local union booth, representing Teamster members who work at Washington Gas. Local 96 and Washington Gas have participated in this fair for the past four years.

Bill Davis, Local 639 shop steward for Giant Food drivers, and Steve Kostro, Local 730 shop steward for Giant Food Warehouse, joined them. Valerie Robertson, assistant to the President of Local 639, was also on hand to help make the connection between the union and the community for the students.

Since 1999, the IBT has reached more than 40,000 students through the Skills For Tomorrow project, in an effort to educate them about the labor movement, global economy, workplace rights and union industries.

High school juniors from four area technical schools will compete this month for 31 new summer intern positions created at Sikorsky Aircraft as part of a program that its organizers describe as among the most promising efforts to get tech-school grads real trade jobs after graduation.

Officially known as the "Teamsters/Sikorsky School-to-Career Union Mentoring Program," the eight-week summer session was launched just four years ago with two summer positions.

This summer, 16 high school seniors, who completed last year's program as juniors, will return for eight weeks of work following graduation. Of the eight seniors in last summer's program, six were hired as permanent Sikorsky employees.

Joe Grabinski, program coordinator and chief steward of Teamsters Local 1150, recalls the program's beginnings. He was contacted by AFL-CIO representatives from Massachusetts who were interested in broadening union mentoring efforts and whose own school-to-career program had collapsed in the mergers and downsizing of the telecommunications industry in the Bay State.

"When I first visited the technical schools in this area and talked to the teachers, they complained about putting their hearts and souls into these kids for two to three years and then they graduated and went to work for Wal-Mart. The students weren't ending up in the trades," recalls Grabinski, himself an alumnus of Emmett O'Brien Technical School in Ansonia. “This program is a home fun for the schools. It gives the kids hope. This is an opportunity for a real-world job for these students, a real career.”

But the schools aren’t the only winners. Grabinski says Sikorsky benefits because it gets young people into its workforces on a trial basis and it gets a chance to groom these workers and fully evaluate them before making hiring decisions.

”It sure beats a company rolling the dice at a job fair and interviewing, 200, 300, even 400 applicants to fill a few jobs,’ says Grabinski. “With this program, the employer gets a chance to see the students’ aptitude and attitude before they hire them full-time.”

The Sikorsky program couldn't come at a more propitious moment. Connecticut Technical High Schools (CTHS), the state's 11,000-student system of 17 regional technical high schools, has been buffeted recently from within and without. Within the system, Abigail L. Hughes, appointed CTHS superintendent just one year ago, unleashed a hail of criticism, especially from the state’s technical teachers union, when she initiated sweeping curriculum changes to increase the time and attention given to academic subjects, especially reading and math.

Outside the system, a series of articles and editorials in the Hartford Courant blasted the schools' failure to get their graduates jobs in the trades for which they were presumably trained. The articles, published in March, also cited the fact that only 17 percent of tech students met standards in math and reading on the tenth-grade Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT). The articles alleged those basic skill deficiencies were keeping tech school graduates from passing the written trade exams they need to get licensed.

The heightened scrutiny has encouraged critics and defenders of the technical education system to speak out and focused a public and media spotlight on the role of technical schools.

Complaining that they had not been consulted in the curriculum overhaul, members of the State Vocational Federation of Teachers in March voted by a 5-1 margin for a no-confidence declaration against Hughes.

The union also challenged the reported test scores as well as the wisdom of cutting back on tech training in favor of academic subjects. Despite a subsequent vote of support for Hughes by the State Board of Education, Aaron Silvia, the union’s president, said “We are standing by our vote and our goals remain unchanged in terms of removing the current administration.”

Although the curriculum is getting most of the attention, some of the recent changes made by Hughes' administrative team have been smaller and subtler. The word "vocational" was officially deleted from school names and replaced with "technical" as more reflective of the schools' mission. The dean of students at each school also saw their job profiles changed this past fall.

CTHS spokesman Tom Murphy says the deans are being relieved of much of their responsibility for disciplining students so that they can move more aggressively into their communities to "build closer relationships with employers, sell them on the idea of more cooperative work experience

At the heart of the tech school experience, CWE programs release students from school on a cycle schedule so they can work full-time on those days on-site in a local business or industry under the supervision of an assigned employee-mentor.

The assumption is this on-the-job experience improves their technical skills, illustrates the relationship of classroom instruction to job requirements to encourage them to stay in school, gives them solid job experience for their resumes and gets them in the door of a company that might give them a permanent job upon graduation.

"If a manufacturer has an opening to hire an employee to work on a particular piece of equipment, how important is it if that student can say he has already worked on that equipment for a year?” asks Murphy.

The involvement of business and industry in technical schools is as varied as the curriculum and the partnerships can be for short-term projects or long-term objectives.

A computer company partnered with Groton's Ella Grasso Technical School to install computers in a senior-citizen residence. The company donated the hardware and software. The students wired the facility, installed the equipment and tutored residents to use the e-mail, voice mail and camera capabilities.

Other Grasso students are working at the Noank Aquaculture Cooperative, a marine life hatchery that produces ten million oysters, scallops and clams annually. United Technologies recruited its engineers to work alongside technical school students preparing entries for state robotics competitions. Talks are underway with a car dealership to donate and install a high-tech, state-of-the-art automotive repair facility in one school and provide training to teachers and students.

Connecticut's corporate sector has a long and rich history of involvement in the technical education system. From the very beginning, business and industry leaders served as members of what were originally known as craft committees. Later renamed Trade Technical Advisory Committees (TTACs), they are the vehicle for "delivering real-time feedback to schools on the training curriculum," explains Gene LaPorta, principal of Platt Technical School in Milford. "We don't want to be training on obsolete technology or training for jobs that no longer exist."

Each technical school "major" (e.g., carpentry, manufacturing technology, plumbing and heating) has its own TTAC and its members, some of whom are tech school alumni, have input into what is taught and bring insight into what skills are in demand in the local labor market.

Not surprisingly, TTAC members are often the first employers to hire tech school graduates, participate in CWE programs or offer job shadowing, in which students follow an employee through a day’s work.

Area technical school principals seem to agree that they must do more to build the kind of partnerships with business and industry that lead to jobs for their students.

"I'd like to see greater levels of industry involvement so mentoring is not so limited in scope," says LaPorta. "We see such strong relationships develop out of the shadowing experience, for example. Students come back from shadowing enlightened.

"They see that the school doesn’t just simulate industry; it is industry.”

Emmett O'Brien Principal Lisa Hylwa says she is in discussions with William Purcell, president of the Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce, to bring business owners into the school to showcase her school and its students. She also has met with local hospital administrators because shortages of health-care and nursing personnel have convinced her that "health technology is the technical venue we’d like to explore next.”

"Our job is to make our students marketable," Hylwa explains. "The past year is the furthest this school—and maybe this district—has extended its hand to explore the needs of local businesses and ask them, ‘what kind of worker do you want?” Paulett Moore, principal of Eli Whitney Technical High School, in Hamden, agrees.

"We have not done enough reaching out," she acknowledges. "Any job exposure we give the students motivates them. We have speakers coming in and talking about specific trends in technical fields. Even tours of a workplace give them insight into what a job actually entails.

"I'm thinking of inviting graduates from the last five to ten years to come in to the school and talk to the kids," adds Moore. "If we can make it more than a one-time visit, get them in two to three times during a week, I think they’d get a good sense of the students.”

To expand job opportunities for Platt students, LaPorta is forming new partnerships - not just with companies but with their associations. He says his affiliation with Automotive Youth Educational Systems resulted in almost $500,000 worth of new cars being donated by manufacturers for the school’s automotive shop.

Explains LaPorta, "Every industry is becoming standards-based, and aligning our curriculum to national trade organization standards assures employers that our kids have a certain bank of skills."

Grabinski said the three-way partnership between Sikorsky, the union and area technical schools required a substantial commitment from Sikorsky Vice Presidents Beth Amato and Dave Galuska and the Teamsters Local 1150 Principal Officer, Rocco Calo.

"I admit these programs are hard work," says Grabinski. "These aren't turnkey operations. It takes time to develop a relationship between partners and to build this level of trust. It helps if you can see the big picture.”

Hylwa acknowledges that selling companies on hiring tech students isn't an easy sell.

"They're students, after all," she says. "There are maturity issues and insurance requirements. I tell the kids they have to sell the school.

"The outcry from businesses is, ‘We want polished employees. We want employees who are outgoing, who can work with customers, who have good communication skills.' We tell our students it's important to do your work but you have to be able to do that work in cooperation with other employees and you have to look good while you are doing it," Hylwa adds.

Graduating technical school students into stable, well-paying trade jobs has always been a complicated challenge. Some years, when jobs are scarce and business is slumping, it's almost impossible.

One factor that functions in students' favor right now is the aging Connecticut workforce. Grabinski, for example, projects a significant exodus of retiring workers from Sikorsky in the next six to 10 years

"Some companies are catching on fast to the fact that the labor force in Connecticut is old," says LaPorta. "The average age of machinists in this state in the mid-50s. Someone had better start thinking now about who is going to replace them."

Audience: Teachers, K-3 and remedial
Event Type: Workshop/seminar
Sponsor: The Churchill Center
http://www.churchillcenter.org
Deadline: July 15

Preventing Academic Failure (PAF) Part II is a continuation of the study begun in Part I. There will be a review of prior topics in more depth and the introduction of additional subject matter in syllabication, spelling rules, grammatical concepts and comprehension.

~~~~> The Real Mandate: Educate and Fight for Social Justice

Audience: parents, teachers and other educators, community advocates, and child advocates
Event Type: Convention/Conference
Sponsor: National Coalition of Education Activists
http://www.edactivists.org

This conference brings parents, educators, community activists, and child advocates together to share organizing strategies, build networks with public school activists, and share materials and models for public school change.

Always Play Fair™, LLC is a company dedicated to expanding the message of sportsmanship and fair play through the development of fun board games, hip merchandise, youth sportswear, interactive computer games and lessons taught by their mascot, Packy PlayFair™.

Their vision is to make sportsmanship, fair play and good behavior as fundamental to raising successful members of society as the three R's "Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic."

Always Play Fair is dedicated to making quality products that can be used at home, in the classroom, at after school programs and by sports teams. The Always Play Fair™ board game will provide hours of fun, educational play for kids. The teacher lesson plans will enable educators to teach valuable lessons in a fun and motivating context. Packy PlayFair will be an icon that kids will aspire to and a character that parents will welcome into their homes.

Three years after a federal law required states to collect a host of education data, much of that information and more will now be available in one place—giving the public a newfound resource and giving educators headaches over how schools can be compared.

On a free web site to be launched this June, a public-private partnership will post test scores, school spending, student demographics, and other relevant data. The site will feature research tools that allow users to compare achievement across districts, track districts’ and individual schools’ progress in reaching student-achievement goals under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, and find schools and districts that may be outperforming others.

The site also will give people ways to measure whether school spending translates into student learning, as well as a chance to compare schools’ effectiveness.

Developed by Standard & Poor’s School Evaluation Services with help from the Council of Chief State School Officers, the project marks a new era of so-called transparency of school-related data, some analysts say.

“It’s a significant step,” said Chrys Dougherty, the research director for the National Center for Educational Accountability. The Austin, Texas-based group has worked on similar projects in the past, but is not involved in this one.

“This is taking information that states already have and making it more accessible to the public,” Mr. Dougherty said.

But some educators have questioned whether the web site provides a fair way to compare schools, especially in the section that calculates a school’s “return on spending.”

A new web site developed by Standard & Poor’s offers a wide array of information on public schools and tools for analyzing it.

Standard & Poor’s—a New York City-based division of the McGraw Hill Cos. known for its research on stocks and bonds—delayed the launch of the site by two months while its staff responded to complaints of the Washington-based CCSSO that centered on the spending index.

State officials said that they would be watching how critics and supporters of public schools use the data to bolster arguments that specific schools should or shouldn’t get more money.

“We still have concerns about it as a simple method of determining a school’s efficiency,” Lisa Y. Gross, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Department of Education, said of the spending index. “In business, you can do that. Schools are not that simple.”

Yet while they don’t always think the debate over the bang for the buck is fair, state leaders also realize that it’s going to occur, one state official said—whether or not Standard & Poor’s puts those measures on the site.

“A lot of our members understand that this was the inevitable next step in the way data is reported,” said Scott S. Montgomery, the CCSSO’s chief of staff.

For their part, the site’s developers say it will help educators and parents find solutions to their problems by pointing to schools with similar demographics and spending patterns that are doing better at raising achievement.

“The point of this … is to figure out where they’re doing something right and what can we learn from that,” said Paul Gazzerro, a director of Standard & Poor’s School Evaluation Services, which collected and organized the data on the site.

The new site builds on an existing database of states’ student-achievement data by adding new information and features. That earlier database was completed last year with funding from the U.S. Department of Education and the Broad Foundation, a Los Angeles-based philanthropy that supports efforts to improve education.

Broad joined with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in underwriting the new site with $45 million. That funding is to last until early 2007. After that, the funders expect states to pay for the project to continue.

The www.schoolmatters.com site was scheduled to launch on March 29 at 7 a.m. Eastern Time.

Schoolresults.org provided data on student demographics, published scores on state tests for every school in a state, and listed whether each school was making adequate yearly progress toward achieving student proficiency in reading and mathematics under the No Child Left Behind Act. Only Nebraska refused to provide data to the site.

That earlier site offered the ability to compare a school’s achievement with that of others with similar demographics.

By comparison, the new site collects a wealth of data and offers several new tools that help users analyze the information. In addition to all the data on the previous site, it includes:

• School spending amounts, with estimates of how much a district spends on instruction;

• State and district scores on the SAT and the ACT and participation rates on those college-admission tests;

• “School environment data,” such as class sizes, pupil-teacher ratios, and student-suspension and retention rates;

• Community information, such as income levels, property values, and educational attainment of adults in the area; and

Schoolmatters.com also includes new tools that help users compare district and school performance with that of others having similar backgrounds and offers several indexes that help quantify school success.

One tool identifies schools that are outperforming others with similar demographics. A new index—called RAMP—combines reading and mathematics proficiency and measures how close a school, district, or state is to meeting the goal of 100 percent student proficiency in those two subjects by 2014—the goal set under the No Child Left Behind law.

The most controversial index quantifies a school’s and district’s “return on spending.” It uses data on student achievement and school finance to calculate a figure that suggests whether a school or district is spending its money effectively.

During the development of the Web site, CCSSO members complained that the index could unfairly label schools. A low-performing school that’s received an influx of resources, for example, may score low on the index even though the extra money may be helping achievement.

As S&P produced the site, state officials expressed concerns about the data on it and how the data were presented, Mr. Montgomery of the CCSSO said.

The research firm made more than 100 changes to the Web site from its original version, Mr. Montgomery said. Some were minor corrections to data posted on the site; others changed how the site presented the indexes to ensure it didn’t conflict with previously released data.

For example, in earlier versions of the site, the RAMP index appeared when a user requested information about state student performance. Mr. Montgomery said that would confuse users because states report the test scores for individual subjects and across individual grade levels.

Now the layout separates the RAMP index from the test scores that states report on their own.

“It reshapes the look of the site so it doesn’t conflict with what states have previously reported,” Mr. Montgomery said.

While most state education officials endorse the resulting version, concerns persist.

“You don’t have the context in there,” said Andy Tompkins, the Kansas commissioner of education and a CCSSO board member. “It might not represent it in a way that we might have represented it.”

Still, Mr. Gazzerro of S&P’s School Evaluation Services said he expects that the site’s users will investigate further when the data provide results that are either too good or too bad to be true.

“Sometimes the data tell the whole story,” he said. “Sometimes you have to find out more.”

NYSUT is showing solidarity by urging members to avoid Wal-Mart in shopping for back-to-school items in August.

"If teachers partnered with us and didn't buy their back-to-school supplies at Wal-Mart, the impact could be huge," said Paul Blank, director of the Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign, organized by United Food and Commercial Workers International. "Teachers are great deliverers of this message."

"We are asking all our members to make this point to Wal-Mart any way they can—respect workers' rights," said New York State United Teachers President Dick Iannuzzi.

New York teachers have protested Wal-Mart's poor labor practices and staged buy-American events at Wal-Mart stores to show how few of the products the store sells are, in fact, U.S. made. The world's biggest retailer has an extensive track record of suppressing workers' rights to organize.

With individual teachers spending an estimated $400 a year on classroom supplies, Blank said the decision to boycott Wal-Mart could leave the stores with a glut of construction paper, glue, pens, scissors and thumb tacks in the fall.

~~~~> U.S. Student Population Soars to Highest Level

Immigration, Baby-Boomer Shift Result in Record Enrollments

More than 30 years after becoming the largest group of schoolchildren in U.S. history, baby boomers have finally lost their record—to their kids.

A total of 49.6 million children attended public and private school in 2003, beating the previous high mark of 48.7 million, set in 1970 when the baby boom generation was in school.

The growth is largely due to all the children who were born in the late 1940s to early 1960s and have since become parents themselves, the Census Bureau said Wednesday. Rising immigration played a part, too, in pushing enrollment past the 1970 record of 48.7 million.

“You could have predicted this back in 1970 when we had all those kids,” said Mark Mather, a demographer for the Population Reference Bureau, which assesses population trends.

‘Classic Echo Effect’

“We knew they were going to have kids of their own. We have this classic echo effect going on.”

Even if it isn’t surprising, the record tally of students in the first 12 grades poses steep challenges for schools: recruiting teachers, helping children who don’t speak English, keeping class sizes manageable and coming up with enough financial aid for college students.

In population rings outside urban areas and in Western states such as Nevada and California, as examples, the growth has been concentrated, increasing demands on schools.

“They just really don’t have the fiscal capacity to match this,” said Scott Young, senior policy specialist in education for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In districts outside Atlanta, Houston and Las Vegas, enrollment has soared more than 20 percent in last five years, said Bruce Hunter, who directs lobbying for the American Association of School Administrators. His group has identified more than 400 such districts.

“The pressures are to stay up with it, to hire, to get the classrooms staffed, to find quality principals,” Hunter said. “But the joy of it is you have this tremendous opportunity, because the communities have a real clear stake, so you have vibrant school systems.”

In other parts of the country, such as the upper Midwest, the school population has declined in some counties, Mather said. “Some of those kids are driving an hour or two on a bus to get to school because there aren’t enough kids to keep local schools open,” he said.

Immigration helped fuel the boom. A total of 22 percent of students had at least one foreign-born parent, including 91 percent of Asian children and 66 percent of Hispanic youngsters.

Many high-growth states have not prepared well for that racial and ethnic transformation, said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. With the largest ever high school graduating class coming soon, colleges are being pressed to provide capacity for everyone while keeping tuition affordable.

“These kids are coming along at a time when—unlike the baby boomers—their chances of a middle-class life without college are almost nil,” Callan said. “It’s going to drive higher education policy over the next few years. This is a huge challenge.”

During the peak enrollment year during the Baby Boomers’ time in school, almost eight in 10 students were non-Hispanic whites. In 2003, 60 percent of students were white, 18 percent were Hispanic, 16 percent were black and 4 percent were Asian.

Teachers’ diversity an issue the diversity of the teaching corps has not nearly kept pace, said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, which is working to address that disparity.

“The question is, what’s going to be the match?” Weaver said. “It’s not that the teachers who are not minorities cannot teach—they can. But what’s going to be done to create an excellent environment for all teachers and students?”

The enrollment growth is likely to continue through this year, according to the Census Bureau report. Enrollment is expected to drop slightly through 2010—due to a decline in births from 1991 to 1997—but then pick up again, the Census figures show.

All the estimates are based on survey responses from a sample of the population in 2003.

~~~~>Beyond the Basics
Full-Day Kindergarten is Finally Catching On—But at a Price.

By Linda Jacobson

Holding up stiff cardboard figures, Mariam Kupalian runs her kindergartners through a quick review of shapes such as the hexagon and the trapezoid. The children, seated at desks, raise their hands when their teacher asks if anyone can think of a shape with no sides.

She then asks individual students in her class at Cheremoya Elementary School to think of patterns using the names of shapes. “Square, circle, triangle,” five-year-old Blaize Smith offers. Next, the group moves on to a study of the numbers 15 and 16 and the terms “one more” and “one less.”

“I’m working on getting them to use their math vocabulary,” explains Kupalian, who’s been teaching kindergarten for five years. The extended math lesson is just the kind she would not have had time for in the 2003-04 school year, when kindergarten classes ran a little more than three hours.

But this past year, her Hollywood school was among the 173 in the Los Angeles Unified School District offering full-day kindergarten; the remaining 280 in the nation’s second-largest district will follow during the next three years.

“Unfortunately, in a half-day program, you have little time for [anything] beyond the basics,” says James Morris, an LAUSD assistant superintendent for instructional support services. “We really believe this is the key to preventing the achievement gap.”

Los Angeles is so far the biggest but just the latest system to embrace full-day kindergarten, which has been championed by schools nationwide for the extra time it affords to heighten skills and delve more deeply into lessons.

Nine states now require districts to offer it, and the governors of Arizona, Indiana, and Massachusetts all have placed daylong programs at the top of their legislative agendas, even as some observers voice concern about the class’s growing focus on academics and the added burden on teachers.

Full-day kindergarten teachers say they enjoy a stronger connection with students thanks to more one-on-one and small-group time, more opportunities to get to know parents, and more time to tailor instruction to meet specific needs. “I used to feel really awful because I wouldn’t have time to read a book.

Now, I read three or four a day,” says Bronwyn Rubenstein, an educator at Phoenix’s Arrowhead Elementary School in the 34,000-student Paradise Valley Unified School District, which added all-day classes in fall 2004.

“I feel like we’ve built an extraordinary community,” Rubenstein says of her class of 25 children. “And when they go into 1st grade next year, it will be easier. They’ll know the lunchroom routine. They will have already been to music.”

All-day programs don’t always go so melodiously for teachers, however—particularly when they’ve never taught before, as is now more often the case. In Rubenstein’s district, enrollment has increased, pushing more teachers who have never taught kindergarten into classes that are suddenly twice as long. Officials have responded by providing crash-course kindergarten “academies” and veteran primary-grade mentors.

“If you don’t offer them training and support, it’s going to be a very tough year for them,” Rubenstein says.

Union officials say such support also has to include more money. Mike Dreebin, the elementary vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles, says funding levels in his district haven’t caught up with the extension of instructional time. Some no longer have classroom assistants, and he says there aren’t enough staff members now to supervise the extra children on the playground—a task the union contract prohibits teachers from doing.

Moreover, while anecdotal evidence of daylong kindergarten’s benefits for children isn’t hard to find, few formal studies have been conducted, according to a 2002 review of the research by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, Oregon. And some experts on early childhood education have expressed concern about whether moving to all-day kindergarten is just a response to the demands of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and an attempt to fill children’s days with more academic work.

“People ask, ‘Are we going to be putting our kids behind more desks and making them take more tests?’ ”says Kristie Kauerz, early learning program director at the Denver-based Education Commission of the States. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. Full-day programs can still be developmentally appropriate.”

Get Connected: Web Site Links

~~~~> Ergonomics and Students

Why Is It Important?

Students have specific issues in their environment relating to ergonomics that when applied, help to create a more favorable learning atmosphere. Unfortunately, many factors are overlooked in the school setting that are usually implemented in the industrial or office situation.

In the school, the responsibility for productivity and efficiency is mainly left up to the student. As a consequence, students have traditionally been without an ergonomic model for doing schoolwork.

For more information, please visit http://www.ergoboy.com/ergo_for/students.php.

End of Issue

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~~~~> Ergonomics and Students

Send your questions or comments to: info@ibtstw.org ©2005 The International Brotherhood of Teamsters / Minnesota Teamsters Service Bureau

Send your questions or comments to: info@ibtstw.org
©2005 The International Brotherhood of Teamsters / Minnesota Teamsters Service Bureau