12 minute read
THE PATHWAY TO SUCCESS
A Clear Direction for K–12 Career Discernment
There’s a new day dawning in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Students file into their classrooms, greet their peers, open their books, face front. Across all grade levels, teachers impart the lessons of the day, challenging young minds. After school, students scatter to various extracurricular activities, from sports to the arts to committees and groups related to student government, academic honoraries and service clubs.
For years, career academies have also been an important part of the scene here, helping high schoolers plot their next steps after graduation, connecting the dots between high school instruction and the local job market. And now, they’ve laid the groundwork for a new program, Pathways, that in the coming years will expand this process all the way to the earliest grades in the system.
“The longstanding history of our career academies speaks for itself,” said Jake Long, superintendent. “But where I feel Mountain Home Public Schools is taking that step to the next level of Career & Technical Education plus college preparation is through Pathways. We’ve been intentional with our academic programming to where Pathways aligns perfectly with what we’ve been already been doing for well over a decade.
“I honestly don’t know of anyone in the country who has a better model than what we’ve put together on this.”
Under the current system, high schoolers join one of three career academies tailored to their interests and job aspirations. Currently, there are three academies: agriculture, construction, manufacturing and engineering (ACME); health and human services (HHS); and communication, arts and business (CAB) of which students can attend just one or sample all three during their high school career as their interests lead them.
Pathways will begin the process of interest and career discernment much earlier, dividing the process into four broad categories: awareness, exposure, exploration and experience. At each level, students are given age-appropriate opportunities to consider their talents and interests and how those fit into the working world, with education as the key common denominator.
Dr. Dana Brown, Assistant Superintendent of Administrative Services
Photo courtesy of MHPS
— DR. DANA BROWN, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT OF ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES
“Pathways really focuses on career-connected learning that spans grades K-12 and into the postsecondary transition,” said Dr. Dana Brown, assistant superintendent of administrative services and former principal of MHHS. “For example, in grades K-5, teachers focus on career awareness by enhancing their current curriculum. When the local fire department does the fire safety unit in kindergarten through fifth grade, for example, teachers can identify and build excitement for careers that tie with that topic. Students then begin to see a connection between careers and school while teachers enhance learning without adding to their workload.”
Along the way, students are steered toward formally taking stock of their interests and are shown how those interests lend themselves to the working world. This journey of self-discovery includes a myriad of speakers and exposure to jobs within local companies, walking students through the steps in the learning cycle.
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS CHOOSE BETWEEN 3 CAREER ACADEMIES:
‣ Agriculture, Construction, Manufacturing and Engineering (ACME)
‣ Health and Human Services (HHS)
‣ Communication, Arts and Business (CAB)
From left: Taylor Schumaker, Dr. Rob Conner, Cathy Beckham, Dr. Jake Long and Will Beckham outside the main entrance of Mountain Home High School
Photo by Jason Masters
Superintendent Dr. Jake Long
Photo by Jason Masters
— DR. JAKE LONG, SUPERINTENDENT
Concept renderings show potential improvements to the high school campus that will accommodate flagship programs and support Pathways learning.
Renderings courtesy of MHPS
“We are a strengths school; through the Gallup poll our students take the strengths inventory, and we really apply that,” Brown said. “We make sure students are engaged with the development of their own futures. What are my interests? Not what do I want to be when I grow up, but what are my interests?”
R. Scott Flanagin, who taught science courses at Mountain Home High School for 25 years, helped formulate the original career academies. He sees the same comprehensive thinking at work in Pathways as ruled on the original project.
R. Scott Flanagin
— R. SCOTT FLANAGIN, RETIRED SCIENCE TEACHER
“At the time, I was not familiar with academies at all. To some degree, it almost sounded like we were going to become a technical school, teaching kids how to weld and how to build things,” he said. “It took us a while to catch on to the fact that the academies really meant we would teach children what their interests are and plan our curriculum around things that interested them, while still meeting state standards.
“Once that was understood, we began discussing whether to implement the academies as ‘pocket academies,’ you know, start small and then maybe expand it. We’d discuss it in the teacher’s lounge, and we concluded that we don’t want these pocket academies. I was chairman of the science department back then, and I remember saying, ‘We want it wall to wall or not at all.’ That stuck, and it kind of became the theme.”
With the benefit of career-connected learning opportunities, future high school students will have poured a firmer foundation upon which the career academies can continue to build. Shop teacher Owen Carpenter, who has been involved with the career academies for years, said it’s much more efficient — to say nothing of less expensive — for students to experiment with various career fields during primary and high school than it is after graduation.
Owen Carpenter
Photo courtesy of MHPS
— OWEN CARPENTER, SHOP TEACHER
“When we started out, there was still a push for students across the board to attend four-year schools,” he said. “Even today, there’s still the students who say, ‘I don’t know what I want to do. I’m just going to go to college to get my basics.’ I cringe when I hear that. I want to tell them you might as well just start throwing $100 bills at me instead of out the window because that’s what you’re doing.
“Pathways and the academies check all the boxes as far as forming relationships between core classes and career and tech. Four-year schools aren’t for everybody, and this program has helped us shift some students to trades and technical schools, apprenticeships and sometimes just directly into work. We always push some sort of post-secondary training.”
One of the more unique elements of Pathways is how creative teachers can get in connecting their subject matter to some kind of practical, transferrable skill to be applied in the workplace.
“I taught English in the ACME academy,” said Neilla Flanagin who taught for more than a decade at the school. “Now how do you take a group of boys who really don’t want to take an English class, who just want to do things with their hands and take care of the cattle and all that stuff, and teach them poetry or literature?
“I came up with this idea that okay, the first part of this class, we’re going to learn about this and why it’s important and blah, blah. And then, we’ll take the second part of the class and see if you guys can build a replica of Walden’s Pond. And they did; they worked their heads off to get everything they needed to do.
“Along the way, they taught me so much. At times, they had to go weld something, and I said, ‘I taught you something. I’ll let you all teach me how to weld.’ So, that was a bond that I never expected, and it was wonderful.”
Cathy Beckham
Photo by Jason Masters
—CATHY BECKHAM
By far, the most visible and impactful element of the high school program lies in the number and scope of internships it provides, a process overseen by Cathy Beckham.
“These programs didn’t exist when I went to school here, and it would have been very beneficial for me if they had been,” said the 1987 graduate. “I was very involved in Future Business Leaders of America in high school, and I liked numbers, so I thought I’d major in accounting. In my senior year of college, I realized I wanted to teach, but I was already too far into my degree program. Had the academies and the internship program been in place, I could have interned as an accountant one semester and a teacher the next semester and would have quickly realized, before I went to college, that I was supposed to teach.
“That’s why I’m very passionate about what I do. I’m passionate about our kids finding the correct pathway or the correct career or the correct college for them. It’s so special to us to be able to place them in internships, and they can figure out, ‘Oh I like this,’ or ‘Oh, I don’t like this.’”
Jack Baran
— JACK BARAN, MHHS 2014 GRADUATE
Jack Baran, a 2014 graduate from Mountain Home High School now working in St. Louis, experienced this benefit firsthand.
“What was great about having the different academies was if you didn’t like one, you could go to the other. It just gives you that option to experience and explore different things,” he said. “I was in the HHS academy for health care, and I realized quickly that I did not want to go into it professionally. At the same time, I learned things that benefited me a lot in the career I did go into. I still carry on some of the things that I learned in high school to this day.”
Beckham coordinates up to 70 internships per year, possessing a seemingly boundless ability to find the right match for a student’s interests, no matter how far-out that interest is.
“I had a student come in who had an interest in aerospace engineering,” she said. “I’m like, ‘We’re in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and we don’t have an aerospace engineer here.’ Well, there is an Air Force graduate in town who has all these contacts and ties throughout the United States, and now that we have Zoom capability, he agreed to set him up with a guy he knows that’s an aerospace engineer in North Dakota. So now I’m telling kids, if we don’t have that opportunity here, we can set it up, literally for anywhere in the world.”
— JEFF QUICK, CEO FOR THE FOOD BANK OF NORTH CENTRAL ARKANSAS
To a person, everyone agrees that the secret ingredient of the program is the participation of the wider community, which is critical to the process.
Jeff Quick, CEO for the Food Bank of North Central Arkansas and an MHHS grad, has served a variety of roles, from being a mentor to sitting on advisory committees to sponsoring interns.
“The mentorship was once a month where we met with a class of students and stayed with those students throughout their high school careers,” he said. “Basically, those were opportunities to help them understand some of the important things in life and in their careers. It gave them the opportunity to see what different paths there are for success because it doesn’t necessarily have to be college. You may go to mechanic school. You may become a pilot. There are options.
“What we basically want them to understand is, what equals success for you doesn’t necessarily equal success for the next person. There’s no cookiecutter way to set goals and reach them and feel like you’re a productive member of the community. We want to help them understand that, recognize it and prepare for it.”
Dr. Rob Conner
Photo by Jason Masters
— DR. ROB CONNER, VETERINARIAN
Local vet and Mountain Home graduate Dr. Rob Conner has been front and center in the career education process for years. He said while job shadowing and internship opportunities offer an obvious face value for students, there’s a deeper socioeconomic purpose at work.
“We usually have two to three interns per semester, and we’ve been doing it 15 or 20 years, which adds up to quite a few kids,” he said. “One of the things we’re trying to foster is an innovation, not only in your studies or in your job, but how do you innovate in your community over the long term?
“Where this effort ultimately pays off is in retaining people by providing highquality jobs in a place where they want to live. Mountain Home is a beautiful place, and we want it to grow by raising the standard of living without ruining any of the wonderful natural things that we have. That will take innovative and creative thinking, and that’s what we are trying to foster in our young people.”
