New Haven Business Journal: Under Fire, Voc Ed Schools Embrace Change

Training the workforce of tomorrow

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 run 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 workforce 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-to-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, says "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 (CWE) programs and give them a sense of the quality of our kids."

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 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 ten 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."

The article originally appeared in the New Haven Business Journal on May 2, 2005, and was written by Karolyn Schuster. 

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