 Great. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our first of five workforce Wednesday briefings scheduled for each of the five hump days in September. I'm Dan Bressette, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Thanks again for joining us today. I hope you will be back each Wednesday for the rest of the month for the rest of the installments. We decided to highlight climate and clean energy workforce development in September for a few reasons. For one, September starts with Labor Day, always the first Monday of the month to celebrate the contributions of work-a-day Americans and the labor movement that literally built this country and keeps it moving today. In fact, as it turns out, September is National Workforce Development Month. But the main reason is maybe the best reason, the most immediate. Remember last year and years and years before that when Labor Day at the start of September marked the end of summer? Remember summer? That seems like so long ago in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Today, millions of Americans are currently without work, many more working less than before. Millions of students in high school, college, and graduate programs are wondering what online instruction and remote work mean for the start of their careers. Getting everyone back to work is an enormous challenge, complicated by the likelihood that we will not be able to go just go back to the old ways of doing things. But coronavirus is by no means the only threat to our society. Climate change is with us too, and its impacts will get worse unless we get serious and do something about it. And while we press for environmental sustainability and climate resilience, we must ensure that we are also addressing equity and racial justice. Justice coronavirus will not go away on its own. The transition to a decarbonized, clean energy economy requires a deliberate, concerted effort. And that effort will need to be carried out by people, a modern, trained, and inclusive, low-carbon economy workforce, focused on the huge challenges of climate change mitigation and adaptation. That brings us to today, the kickoff briefing of our five-part Workforce Wednesday's Briefing Series. Today, we will learn about preparing high schoolers for green careers. Perfect way to get things started. Today, students in their junior and seniors of high school are wondering what they can do to make the world a better place. Programs like those we'll soon learn about provide these students with critical channels for their energy and formative experiences that will guide them as they become the next generation of leaders, thinkers, doers, and policymakers. One of the brightest hopes we have in the fight against climate change is the amazing enthusiasm for environmental and sustainability causes among young people. And of their appreciation of the urgency of climate change as they watch too many of the previous generations in positions of authority today, fritter and fret, and fail to act. And then over the following four weeks, we will cover a new spin on conservation cores, energy transitions in coal country, growing green industry and innovation, mass timber, and low-carbon small business and post-COVID recovery. Also, and this has not been officially announced yet, so a sneak peek, we're also working on a bonus briefing to get some added attention to the just transition taking place in coal communities. Workforce development is timely and important, but it's hardly the only climate and clean energy topic we've covered during briefings. Take a moment to visit www.esa.org and access full archive of webcasts and presentation materials. For instance, in June, we hosted experts who discussed coastal resilience in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. About a month later in mid-July, we convened a panel of experts to help us analyze the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis Staff Report. And you can also watch the six panels that made up this year's virtual Congressional Clean Energy Expo. And speaking of the Expo, care to guess which topic was the first in the agenda back on July 3rd? 30th? I couldn't even remember. Well, I'll give it away. Clean energy workforce development. It's that important. When you visit us online, I hope you'll sign up for our Climate Change Solutions newsletter, which is a great way to stay informed about our briefings and receive our fact sheets and other educational resources. Before we get to our briefing and hear from our panelists, let me tell you how you would engage with us today and ask questions. After our final panelists, we will open up the floor for questions. But because we're online today, I cannot call on you if you have a question. So please follow EESI on Twitter at EESI online and send us your questions in that way. If you'd rather, you can also send us an email to EESI at EESI.org. We will pull from your submissions once we get to that Q&A portion. And now, on to our panelists. Up first is Ben Gittes. Ben is a senior policy analyst for the Bipartisan Policy Center's Economic Policy Project. Before joining BPC, he was deputy policy director on the team that helped Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, consider an independent run for president of the United States. Before that, he was director of labor market policy at the American Action Forum, where he researched and wrote about paid family leave, the opioid crisis, minimum wage and immigration, among other issues. Ben was a member of the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution working group on paid family leave, where he developed a model for estimating the cost of paid leave proposals. Ben, I'll turn it over to you. Welcome and thanks so much for joining us today. Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate this opportunity to help contribute to this conversation. It's a very important conversation. I'm not an environmental expert. I'm here to talk to you about, give a broad overview of our workforce development system and ways to improve it so that we have more opportunities for career and technical education. As our economy changes and develops in ways like the help support green energy initiatives and other developments just in other industries. So to start, it's just important to note that technological innovation rapidly changing the economy and the major workforce disruptions brought on by COVID-19 have both significantly elevated the need for Americans to develop new skills and transition into new careers. Before getting up into what we need to change. Let's think about how do we prepare workers for economy now. I tend to think of our skills development system as targeting two different populations. First for younger people who are just preparing to enter their careers. We tend to be heavily reliant on our traditional educational institutions education. We tend to have the objective of sending folks to college to obtain a bachelor's degree and having bachelor's degree is economically rewarding. As a result, high schools are largely aimed at preparing students for college and we also at this point in our careers or in our education tend to view our education as a one part of your life that once you finish it, you're ready to enter your job market and don't intend to look back. But then for older mid-career professionals, we have a workforce development system that's there largely for them in case they are displaced from their work and are looking to retrain and transition into new jobs. And that's where a lot of our career and technical education is available and that receives a good amount of federal support. So as a result, while we have this traditional education system for younger folks, our workforce development system is really more of a reactive system that's there for you in your career if something goes wrong. What we don't have and what we need in this mix is a more proactive workforce training system that is both effectively integrated with employer needs and is able to provide more viable options for those who don't get a bachelor's degree in order to build a career. And that system should really be targeting folks from the very beginning of their career. So there are a few shortcomings to note with our current system. First, despite all our emphasis on getting a bachelor's degree, only a minority of the US adult population has a bachelor's degree. We, about a third of US adults hold a bachelor's degree and even among millennials, about 40% have a bachelor's degree. Moreover, not everyone, not college is not best for everybody. Only about 60% of individuals who attend college finish within six years. And those who don't finish college don't they tend to accrue the costs associated with it with the student debt and they aren't able to benefit from the degree potential that bring that that it can provide. Another shortcoming is that the folks who are involved in our education and workforce training systems and and the economy and the businesses, everything is too silent. Meaning there's little integration between what people are learning in their education and the workforce needs that exist in our economy to illustrate how this is played out. Businesses have become increasingly reliant on education and workforce development for providing the worker skills that they need. As a result, over time, they've reduced their investment in training their own workforce. And they've become more reliant on the bachelor's degree, particularly in high growth industries for screening applicants. As a result, we a lot of the times where the job growth is where the best career opportunities are are denied to those who don't have a bachelor's degree. At the same time, education institutions are largely left to train workers on their own without little input from businesses. As a result, the degrees and credentials that workers have don't necessarily reflect the skill sets and competencies they have. And the results is a mismatch between the worker skills and the jobs that are available. Some of the consequences of this have been a number of poor outcomes. First, from the student and worker perspective, there's highly disparate economic outcomes by educational attainment in the United States, with those who do not have a bachelor's degree being left behind. Just a few numbers to run through in 2018, a poverty rate for somebody with a bachelor's degree was only about 4%. If you have a high school degree, that poverty rate increased to 12.7%. Even through this coronavirus pandemic and the resulting workforce disruptions, those with a bachelor's degree are doing okay. Their unemployment rate as of July was 6.7%. Folks with educational attainment at lower levels were all grew to over 10%. The problems don't stop with just the students, however. The skills mismatches that occur because there's a disconnect between employers and education institutions has resulted that employers having a tough time finding workers with the appropriate skills they need. Leading into the COVID-19 pandemic, employers had a really difficult time filling job openings because they couldn't find those workers with the skill sets they wanted. And as a result, job openings in the United States grew and remained at record highs of over 7 million. Lastly, because our system is largely reactive for helping workers retrain rather than helping them continue to learn and develop skills throughout their life, when it does come time for workers to change career paths, they often struggle to do so. And that's because by the time they end up needing to reskill is often too late for the system to efficiently help them. They don't know what jobs are out there, what training is available, or the skills they need. And they don't know how to communicate the skills that they already have in an effective way to future employers. Now this issue is only going to be growing more and more apparent over time. According to McKinsey, and this is practically because of the technological innovation we're seeing and the way it's impacting the economy, according to McKinsey, up to 50% of current U.S. work activities could ultimately be automated. Now that doesn't mean we're going to lose 50% of jobs, but it does mean that workers who have those jobs are going to have to figure out a way to transition to new work activities. And then also the workforce disruptions caused by COVID-19 will likely add significant strength to our existing workforce development system, as millions of workers will likely need to reskill in order to obtain jobs. This will likely make the system even less effective unless we're able to improve it in a more proactive way. So rather than this reactive patchwork system that we have that catches people often when things go wrong, we need a more proactive system that meets the economic needs that businesses have, and also allow Americans who do not get a BA to build a viable pathway to their careers from the very beginning of their career. So how do we achieve that? Well, in my view, I think it should start with high school. High schools today are largely aimed and built to help prepare students for college rather than building their careers. I believe what we need is having high schools focus on both college and career readiness. Broadening this focus will provide students the tools they need when they decide not to go to college. And as part of this, we need to bring in more career and technical education in our high schools, so that they are proactively exposing students to those skills they need to transition, either to a technical institution or directly into a career, a viable career right out of high school. I also want to note that when I say that we need more career and technical education, I do not think that means that high school should be reverting back to sticking students on separate tracks. Rather, students should be given the options to pursue courses and pathways that would help them develop those technical skills should they not want to go to college, while also giving them the opportunity to pursue more college-ready focuses. In addition to greater career and technical education in high school, students and their families should be given more information about the labor market and career opportunities at a much earlier age. This is important for students to understand what's out there in their labor market, the education and training that's involved in each, and their economic outcomes. Some say exposure to career exploration should begin in the middle school, as it relates to eighth grade. And today, a lot of the times that type of career exploration doesn't happen until closer to the end of high school. Similar to more information to empower students' decisions, we need to provide students with greater transparency about the program options they have and the outcomes that they provide to students. So students can make the best decisions for themselves and they can hold those institutions accountable for those outcomes. Just as a brief example of the power of this type of information, consider a high school senior who's thinking about their next steps once they graduate. If they're choosing between a four-year college that has no cost in tens of thousand dollars a year, results in student debt, and maybe when they finish, they'll have a paycheck that tolls about $45,000 a year, or they have this option of going with an apprenticeship that will pay them to attend, it might take another year or two, but by the time they finish, they'll have a competitive salary of $60,000 to $7,000 a year. That apprenticeship would look pretty good. Unfortunately, right now we don't have the tools or the systems in place to help students digest this information or give it to them in a way where they can really think about how it impacts the decisions. This type of outcome transparency is also important for lawyers too and really benefit them because they have a better understanding of the skills and competencies that are associated with different programs and different degree types. In addition to more information and career and technical education, as a whole, our education and workforce development system needs to develop a culture of lifelong learning and provide the tools to support that lifelong learning. As I'd already mentioned, education and learning in the United States is typically viewed as an early stage part of your life and concludes before your career starts. But in reality, the economy will always change in ways that we can't predict, and our skills and development is a lifelong endeavor. So I think we should embrace it as a lifelong endeavor and prepare workers just starting their careers and who must change jobs throughout their careers. And as a result, we need to have that lifelong learning mindset and provide students with the tools to support that. So what could some of those tools look like? One option that's been tossed out there is this idea of a verified resume. This would be a standardized way, it would be some sort of form or digital document that would be a standardized way of accounting for the skills and competencies that individual gains throughout their career and education. And they would be verified by previous employers, education institutions and community organizations. And it would be an effective way for workers to communicate to future employers in new career areas, the skills and competencies they have in order to obtain a new position. Another idea is this notion of stackable credentials. This idea would essentially allow students to develop, gain credentials as they build skills and competencies throughout their career and build upon one another. And so as an example, rather than just getting a credential at the end of an education program and obtaining the degree, you would be building credentials throughout the program as you develop the competencies that would reflect it. This would be particularly helpful to anyone who does not complete an entire degree program. So they would be able to reach some of the benefits that are associated with the, some of the benefits that are associated with the learning that they've had. Lastly, we also need to provide the financial support that's necessary to help individuals pursue lifelong learning. And one idea is this thing, this idea called the lifelong learning account. This would be a 401k type account that an individual government and employer can contribute to throughout an individual's life, which they can pull from to fund their education and training. Lastly, educators, businesses and government need to start working more closely together. The three are really siloed when it comes to skills development. Businesses and educators, business can identify to educators the skills that they need and educators can work with businesses to develop the curriculum that they want. And, and also, I think a good example of this is Emerson Electric, which began to introduce new pay trainee positions after they identified a local technical college that could help them develop that curriculum to provide that training. Finally, the government needs to play a more coordinated and central role in providing financial support and coordinating these programs. A good example of how that can do so is this program called skillful in Indiana and Colorado. This is a good example of in this program, businesses, educators and policymakers have partnered together to develop an effective pipeline of skilled workers who do not have a college degree. So just to quickly summarize, with a more proactive workforce development system, we can create better options for those without a BA to build careers and adopt as the economy changes. This is important for workers with greater access to successful careers, employers who will be more able to identify worker skill sets and obtain the competencies that they need. And the education system as a whole, which will be better suited to provide greater return on investment that the students make in it. Thanks, Ben. That was a great presentation. I really appreciate that. Just a quick reminder before we move to our second panelist that if you have questions, you are able to ask them. You can email them to us, EESI at ESI.org, or the preferred group is to follow us on Twitter at EESI online and ask them that way. Now let us move on to our second speaker. Cody Jasek has been passionate about education, energy, and the environment. And that makes his role directing the Green Tech Academy at Olathe West High School a perfect fit. And looks like he's actually, Cody, you look like you have a perfect fit with your background too. Probably the most impressive, certainly compared to mine. The Green Tech Academy is an innovative high school program where students learn in-depth about renewable energy and sustainability through hands-on projects and experiences. Through partnerships with education and industry leaders, what Cody has done with the Green Tech Academy serves as a case study for programs also looking to develop the next generation workers for renewable energy and sustainability. Cody, thank you so much for joining us today. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you for that introduction. I'm very excited to have the opportunity to speak with you all today. I feel like what we have going on in the Green Tech Academy is incredibly unique, and I have a lot of fun doing it. So I'll try and stay under 3,000 words per minute when I'm speaking. But I hope to show you guys what a high school program could look like that would prepare students for jobs out there in the renewable energy workforce. Again, my name is Cody Janasek. A lot of people in my life know me as Mr. Janasek, though, or Mr. Jay, and I am the facilitator for the Green Tech Academy at Olathe West High School. So our high school is located about 20 miles southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. We're a suburb in Olathe, Kansas. Our school district is the Olathe Public School District, and there's about 30,000 students in our district making us one of the largest school districts in the state of Kansas. Throughout our school district, we have 21st century programs, and the Green Tech Academy is one of those 21st century academies. So these academies got their start back in 1999 where district leaders sought out feedback from individuals and businesses in the area on what a 21st century high school should look like. A lot of the feedback that they got is that students should be able to pursue different career studies and also build employability skills like problem solving, having the ability to set goals, doing self-management, and practice the interpersonal skills that you get when you're in a job. So the 21st century academies were created to address those feedback that they got and also to address the most demanding careers at that time. So we now have over 15 different academies in our district. They range in subjects from e-communications, business finance, engineering, and then the other academy that's at our high school is called the Public Safety Academy. So there's some things that all 21st century academies have in common. We interview eighth graders that are interested in our academies, and they can go from any of the middle schools to any of the high schools to attend those programs. So, feasibly, I could interview an eighth grader that would typically go to Olathe South, and they could come to Olathe West to be in the Green Tech Academy if that's what they're passionate about. So we all interview eighth graders, so they're in it for all four years of high school, and we have a focus on employability skills. The time in the academy is kind of capped off with a capstone project, and students are hoping to receive a 21st century academy endorsement from their program, depending on how much extracurricular stuff they do alongside that. So the idea for Green Tech is kind of a chicken and egg situation, but I think it emerged out of the planning for Olathe West High School. We're the newest high school in our district. Our first year we were open was the 2017-2018 school year, and throughout the planning process, we wanted our building to reflect what the most recent pedagogy was out there. You can kind of see my space is unique. It's got a lot of open space, solar panels, wind turbines, and they wanted a space that facilitated both student-centered instruction and project-based learning. So alongside this, we wanted to make it a case study in what a sustainable high school could look like, and we added a lot of really cool sustainability features throughout the school. There's adaptive lighting that's responsive to daylight, so if a cloud goes over the daylight or the amount of lighting in a room might change. We have a rainwater capturing system up in the horticulture area to water plants and vegetables, and then outside Green Tech there are 104 solar panels or 35 kilowatts of solar so that the entire footprint of Green Tech is 100% powered by renewable energy. And it is the only 21st century academy to be powered by 100% renewable energy for the time being. Other academies, I hope, are headed that way. But the teachers and students typically really enjoy being in the building because it has an emphasis on sustainability and the occupancy health and comfort is at the forefront. So the idea came about that if our building is going to be like this, there should be a 21st century academy located here that is related to renewable energy and sustainability. But that being said, our academies also created in response to labor demands in the Kansas City area. As you all know, STEM education is incredibly important in the, and not just Kansas City, but the nation as a whole, but Kansas City has a few large STEM companies that are based here. Garmin is also in Olathe that employs a lot of people and Cerner, but our district reached out to the industry and businesses in the area, but also on a national scale. And one area that was identified was a need for additional energy and sustainability programs. Programs exist out there, but they're most likely focused on taking one course and not necessarily over four years like our program is. And our local electrical utility evergy, which it serves like 1.6 million customers in Kansas and Missouri was concerned about the growing demand for energy workers and having to replace their skill workers out there. So they're a huge partner of our academy. I actually have a quote here from them about their partnership with us. Evergy views its partnership with the Green Tech Academy as a way to create awareness around careers and energy and build a pipeline of diverse talented individuals into evergy. Over the next five years, we hope to hire 150 line workers alone and want to recruit graduates of the Green Tech Academy and programs like it to fill many of these roles. Along with line workers, we project future opportunities including relay technicians, cable splicers and substation operators making our partnership with the Green Tech Academy at the high school level even more important. So I don't think evergy is unique in this situation for utilities that they're finding themselves in a situation where they need a large volume of skilled workers in a very short time period. They said 150 line workers in the next five years in addition to other roles that they know they're going to need. So that's in addition to two of the largest or the fastest growing jobs right now in the United States according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics are solar installer and wind turbine technician. And Kansas last year actually generated 41% of its electricity from wind. So we know that the wind industry in Kansas is huge and that there's going to be a growing demand for people that do wind turbine technician or wind turbine maintenance out there, especially in Kansas and the area. So we know that energy and sustainability is important for those careers but it also relates to people that are designing buildings and a large number of other categories and careers that are out there that are really in high demand. So a consequence of this is that we have a curriculum that exposes students to a wide variety of topics and then has them gain as many skills as possible. Our curriculum is in the career and technical education energy pathway for the state of Kansas so it's very STEM and engineering focused, but new this year we're actually adding the agriculture pathway so that students more interested in sustainability can pursue that with an agriculture focus. You'll also notice that we're geared towards project based learning. The freshman year is mostly aimed at whether the students want to pursue renewable energy or sustainability. So in the fall they take intro to energy and the spring they take intro to sustainability. In the fall they explore topics like thermodynamics, building energy usage, environmental design, and they actually conduct an energy audit of our building here. And since our building was designed with our program in mind, they're able to access systems that give them real time data on electricity, natural gas and water consumption with 15 minute resolution. So if I gave you a graph on our water consumption at the school you'd probably be able to figure out when passing period is and when lunch is and when school gets out. It's pretty cool. But doing these projects when we've been able to save our school money, even though we're incredibly efficient. And this is what led us to being named the Kansas Green School the year last year. And then in the spring we switch our focus to sustainability and agriculture. And with Kansas being the sunflower state I made the semester project for that class, having a competition to see which group can grow the tallest sunflower. I give them a bunch of soils and fertilizers and they have to record everything they do every drop of water they put into that home depot bucket with their seed they have to record it, and it's really cool. Very hands on so again they choose their specialization after their freshman year, but I'm going to focus on the energy pathway here their sophomore year they take a course called energy power and society. This is where they focus on social economic environmental aspects of energy. And we have a special emphasis on wind energy during this course where they do the kid and challenge and learn principles of engineering by designing building and performance testing their own wind turbine. So I've had students 3D print their own gear boxes for the kid when competition or even use a CNC machine to cut out blades. And so it's really cool to have them apply advanced manufacturing techniques to this challenge. I also supplement this curriculum with the National Energy Education Development Projects curriculum for the need project. And we kind of do some other things here and there like wiring up solar panels so that the students start practicing workplace safety, which comes into their junior year where they take energy industry fundamentals and workplace safety is a huge part of that course. That course provides them with a broad understanding of the electric and natural gas utility industry introduces them to business models regulations types of energy use to create electricity. And then at the end of this course they have the opportunity to take an exam that's recognized by the energy industry. And they can get a credential through the Center for Energy Workforce Development or the CEWD. And that will serve them well if they go to try and ever apply it to somewhere like Evergy and Evergy is actually kind of serving as industry experts during that class to make sure when we talk about substation operation. It's correct and accurate. So lastly the senior year is spent on a capstone project that culminates all four years in their time in the program and it's really aimed at preparing them for after high school. So in the past we've had students intern at solar companies to do feasibility studies of getting solar at different buildings in our district. We've had students work with the US Green Building Council and the Green Student Mentoring Program to seek out leadership and environmental and energy design. I messed that up but it's lead certification. And then we've had other students that go and do shadow opportunities or make gardens in our school. I had a student actually make a farming robot for that garden and they named it broccoli overlord. So they wanted me to share that. This class is basically again meant to help them prepare for whatever they want to do after high school and as a time to do that workplace work based learning experience. So after high school our program is still new and growing and I'm excited to see where their students are going to grow. I know the first group of our graduates came through in May and we have them pursuing certificates in blade turbine repair sustainable horticulture and degrees in engineering and construction management. So there's not really a lot of high school students that are graduating knowing this much about the energy industry and I feel like the right of course content skills and knowledge that these students are gaining are going to help them with whatever they end up doing post secondary. In terms of federal and state programs out there that help the Green Tech Academy and programs like us at the state level. We have the Kansas Energy Program which is funded by the Kansas Corporation Commission that promotes energy education. If chances are that your state has something out there with their public utility commission that is aimed at promoting energy education and if it doesn't I think it probably be an incredibly popular idea to create that or partner up with the utility to get that going. At the federal level we are a career and technical education program so we receive funding from CTE funds and for both our energy and agriculture pack pathway. We can also use Carl Perkins funding to go towards purchasing new equipment and software so definitely fund those they help us out tremendously. Another thing that helps us out a lot is the Department of Energy funds wind activity centers and the win for schools program. They help oversee the kid win challenge and come and help me anytime I need help with curriculum development and they're the ones in Kansas are incredible so definitely fund your wind activity centers. I think this is my idea for what could happen at the federal level or the national scale would be see a coalition of high schools teaching renewable energy topics out there. I think personally I would benefit from there being a network of other teachers that are having a similar curriculum over the course of four years rather than just one or two courses. And then some sort of national program or some sort of facilitator between these states interacting with this and building awareness would be incredible and I think that would just supplement what my students have with their Academy endorsement if they had something that was nationally recognized to be for renewable energy for the workforce so I guess my final notes here are that if you're a school district out there that's considering making a program like this and you might feel like it's really hard to do but there's a lot of really incredible curriculum out there and I would be willing to help point you guys in any ways your need and then put yeah just putting it together has been kind of a lot and I've learned a lot so I'm definitely willing to work with you. There's a lot of really good engineering and stem programs out there and they've been incredibly successful so I think just taking what they've done and adapting it to renewable energy specific training or workforce development would be incredible. So if we could do that, that would be my biggest takeaway. So thank you to ESI and everyone that came and listened. Great. Thank you Mr. Jay. That was an excellent presentation and I think I would be remiss if I did not give an extra shout out to Broccoli Overlord. Also what was the tallest sunflower do you remember? Oh man. So they start growing them in like March and then by May we go off to summer so they're only like three or four feet tall but I planted some of them and by August they were like 10, 12 feet tall. They're massive. So they grew well. That's great. That's great. And I think and we're doing well on social media today. I encourage people following us to make hashtag Broccoli Overlord a thing. Yeah, that's pretty great. We just before we move on to our final speaker just a reminder if you have questions for Ben for Mr. Jay and for our next panelist. The best way to get them to us is by following us on Twitter at ESI online. You can also send us an email ESI at ESI.org. Our next panel is Brian Butler. Brian is an aquaculture aquaculture teacher in Ocean Springs High School or at Ocean Springs High School. Brian started an high school aquaculture program in Mississippi in 2016. Since the conception the program has grown to over 8,000 square feet of greenhouses 15,000 gallons of water and four different species of fish and crustaceans. Brian, I know you're at school today. You're in a working classroom. Thank you for taking time away from your students and thank you to your students for letting us have you for a little while today. I really can't wait for your presentation. Welcome. Hey, how are y'all? I'll go ahead and share my screen. And we can get rolling. My name is Brian Butler and I am the teacher at Ocean Springs, the Ocean Springs Aquaculture Program. We started in 2016. Originally, there was a an agriculture based or horticulture based class in Mississippi, but there was not an aquaculture class. So I spoke with MDE, which is the Department of Education here, and we were able to add the program itself to the curriculum which we had to build from scratch and work from with the students themselves. All right, so all four of our greenhouses are 30 foot wide and 48 feet long. We have 34 400 gallon systems in each one. I have 22 running freshwater and the other 12 are running saltwater right now. They originally are just now building them to start up for the year. This is what the inside of each one of them looks like in the beginning. They have started spreading out their seeds and getting all their plant based stuff ready. Their first project they work on is a floating type of aquaponics system. Those systems are generally started with their seeds. The first batch they like to run is usually a vining or a leafy green type of plant. We have just introduced our first species of fish that we work with always from August to December. We start out with catfish. Catfish is the leading producer of aquaculture in Mississippi. We're one of the largest producers in general of catfish as well, and so we always start out with catfish. Those catfish are then released out into the tanks. Each tank gets 50 to 60 catfish per tank. That allows me an allowable grow rate. By the end of December, we're able to grow and move those catfish into a larger pond type setting to where we can continue to grow. This is one of the final weights we have. This is one of the fish right before it was transported. The reason we do the 50 to 60 fish is because the overall growth of them, they will not be sustainable in a 400 gallon tank. If you put more than that, right at that point, I'm just catching the end of the run to where they will start banging into each other or even to where they need more room to grow from the original 400 gallon tank. At this time, they've started moving their plants. The plants will then be transferred into the tank or they will build their own self-designed aquaculture or aquaponics system. The systems basically take and re-clean the water. That way the water is sustainable and we don't waste any water that comes out of any of the systems. All of our excess wastewater is used back in broodstock and put back into the systems for seeding or for digestion within the plant cycle along with. Plants have started to grow now. This is a run they did with some tomatoes and also some eggplant. The eggplant you can see is on the right hand side and the tomatoes are starting to grow on the opposite to that. Leafy greens as well, kale, watermelon and things of that sort. All of the vegetables and food that they raise in class is consumed in class or distributed throughout the school and the classes with culinary that we have as well or the marketing classes that they use for different applications. We've also supplemented our cafeteria as much as we can as far as tomato production to go towards our leafy green salad bars that we have every day. I can't keep up with the total number. We have about 2,200 students so I can't keep up with the overall concept but I can supplement and help them to keep going. At this time you can see cabbage and tomatoes are starting to grow really well. We're starting to pull cabbage, tomatoes, okra, things of those sorts. All the students take them and begin to use them for other applications. After that we've switched over now. We are getting our first level stages of our striped bass. Striped bass is one of our restoration projects that we do. The striped bass themselves are released at the end of the growing period for a sport fish application that we work on. We release these fish in order to put them back into the water so they can be later caught by other fishermen and used in other applications as well. So start period here. This is day two of the fish collection and they are starting to put them out into the tanks. Here is probably a two or three week growth on the beginning. I'm usually getting different patterns as well. It depends on the actual fish but this is probably a month and a half or so in. They'll start doing weights and measures on the fish. They log their growth, they log the growth of their plants and they're able to see which feeding rates and which tank situations allow their fish to grow the most. The goal is to get them to five to seven inches. That is my good tag rate and that is a good spot to release them. At this point all of our vegetables are growing really well. We're starting to pull cabbage out. We're starting to pull collard greens as you can see here. Then the collard greens are taken to our culinary class where they're cooked. Then we all share a meal of collard greens and things that we are able to do. That adds into our tank to table program that we run. A lot of the food that we harvest including fish are used with our culinary classes and they cook them in class and then distribute them to the teachers throughout the district. We're growing here now, getting a little bit more into our cucumbers. These cucumbers were all taken and pickled. We actually made an aquaculture run of cucumber pickles and handed out to the students. It's getting into tomato season. Tomato plants are starting to get a lot bigger. My main run that they like to do is a cherry tomato. Different variations of that. Originally I started doing like a beef stock or something of the longer larger lines. The problem with that is it takes too long to get red and the kids get antsy about not being able to harvest them and eat them fast enough. When the tomatoes take too long they tend to want to pick them before they're ready so they can take them home and ripen themselves. A couple cabbage pictures we're running through here. Last year we even tried a little bit of a run with beets. We did a beet run that we didn't think would work but it was actually done on a floating aquaponics system to where the beets were never actually in the water. We just used a root based system to employ them in to get their nutrients. That was coming fresh from the fish tanks and they were able to pull all of their nutrients and everything directly out of the water. After about two or three months of running the plants and everything we always run into a pest problem. It's right when the weather changes everything starts to cool off or warm up. So we'll switch over as you know Mississippi has a very high climate. Right now it's probably heat index is probably about 105. It's about 94 degrees outside so as the time changes and it starts to cool off a little bit is when our white flies black flies and other aphids start coming in. This is when instead of using a pesticide based program to keep us close as we can to being organic we use a employment of lady bugs. The lady bugs are locally grown and we get them and use them for our pesticide protection. They go all throughout the greenhouses and they are what individually disposes of all of our pest issues. It's a real big day for the kids to release lady bugs. They like to put them back into the systems and then eventually they will go out into the environment as they were originally here's some smaller pictures from there. And so the students will put them on they will eat the white flies attack the aphids and other of those means. We've now gotten to the end of the run for fresh water and these fish are then transported with the help of the University of Southern Mississippi and the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources. They were released out into the wild. Last year we released about 1100 fish. All of those fish were tagged. We tag all of our fish so we can keep a track of where they're going. The fish themselves are released out into the water. The water so far last year's fish I've had nine phone calls. They are able to give me a GPS report on where the fish were caught and then they can in turn tell me how the students fish has grown the way it's gained and the actual year that it's caught. Each one of the tags has the graduating class on the tag itself. So I've also gotten calls from previous years recently this year to where someone caught a striped bass that we released in 2018 that had grown to a large edible size that was pretty amazing. After the run on striped bass I switched to my year two kids. My year two students start growing what we call speckled trout. Speckled trout is a saltwater fish and a very, very large game fish that runs through Mississippi and the Lowering Coast areas. We start off with a growth rate here. I keep these fish for a little bit longer. They tend to take a longer period before they are ready for release. They are tagged as well with a tag in the operculum. And that operculum tag is able to be scanned by anyone that participates in our collection process. The collection process will allow them to catch fish and put tags in them that are external. But if they need to they can look in the internal tag that involves the operculum as well. Into the year run we're looking at a speckled trout that is about this size. We've had these speckled trout in the tank now for about seven to eight months. We start in a mid-February, September and harvest late April, early April before the school year gets out. Process is the same. They will have these fish and they will use them to put back into the water and allow them to be caught at a later date. The aquaculture program itself is using the water for the tanks. I take all the salt water that comes off of these tanks and put it directly into our oyster tanks. Our oyster tanks are where we grow our oysters from spat. With the Department of Marine Resources they come over. We spawn a series of oysters. We pull the spat from those oysters and then get them to attach to our system. With our old shells that we recycled from before. And so all of our wastewater goes directly back into the oysters which adds to their feed and allows them to grow and then be released at a later time as well. Along with those we add in a run we do on crawfish. They do a crawfish which is a locally pulled crawfish out of Louisiana. Those crawfish are taken on by each student. They do that along with our marsh grass products. We grow a lot of needle brush and things like that for restoration of sunken in areas or areas of erosion in the natural environment. Instead of putting in a bulkhead or a series of rocks we always like to put and replant a natural grass that we grow. The grass that we grow is given out to people that are having these issues. And then they can use it to replant and reestablish a weed line on the front of their property so they don't have to worry about erosion or anything of that sort. So you can see here where the crawfish are and where the Spartina are growing in to help them add to the growth. The plants in here absorb the waste from the crawfish and that's where they get most of their nutrients plus a supplemental feed that we give them to add back to it. There's a close-up of one of the crawfish. Speckle trout are getting ready to be released. They are getting good size on them now. You can see here from this picture, maybe I should go this way first. The speckle trout and the striped bass are all removed and put out in a large containment area and then released through this hose system we have here. This is a striped bass you can see coming out. You can see the tag on that and that's how they are put back into the water. Students here are setting up the pump system that we use when we release. The system itself is an easy way to blend these salinity levels or the freshwater depending on which area of the bayou or brackish water we are installed in. That area will be set up to if we keep our fish at eight parts per thousand, we get to the bayou where we are going to release them. If we've had some rain, we've had any other conditions, the water temperature there will change and we'll have to adjust our fish to the new setting. We pump water over them and allow them to blend for 20 to 30 minutes and then after that we add a stress coat reliever and a couple things before they are released back into the water through the hose. As soon as they are released they hit the bottom, they take off swimming and we wait to catch them on a later date. I spoke before about a collection picture. This was a striped bass that was caught. This is a 2018 fish that was caught in 2019. It has tripled in size if not more and after the picture I believe it was collected by the fishermen who caught it and taken home for dinner. As mentioned earlier, a lot of these classes are based on jobs and working with CTE. Our main program that we install with is the Gulf Coast Reachers Lab. The Gulf Coast Reachers Lab is a huge beneficiary to my students who are in year three. My aquaculture one students who do freshwater are always going to be sophomores. My year two students are going to be juniors and then my year three students are going to be seniors. These seniors travel to the research lab and to the department of resources to work during their given block of the day. And while they are there they do anything from spawning triple tail to reestablishing community connections with oysters and many different things that go along there. This is a picture here of the beginning of our grass project that grass triples in content and in size and is used to spread out all the way through. And our current numbers up to this point, we've released 2,405 spotted sea trout and 2,800 striped bass. Okay, and that's aquaculture at Osferings High School in a nutshell. Everything we do is geared towards people having an ability to gain their biology knowledge or to grow knowledge to be able to go directly into a greener field such as aquaculture or oyster production. Or anything like that. I've also had students go and do salmon research up north. They've started their own horticulture companies. They've done green roots food to where they will build a greenhouse and have an ability to do aquaponics and then take that food and sell it directly back to the local grocery stores or at markets and things like that. That's a delicious presentation, Brian. Thank you very much for joining us. We have to, we don't, we never repeat briefings, but we might have to make an exception because those colored greens looks way too good to miss. And if we could be in person, maybe there may be some ethics rule, but you know, on the hill, but man, that was really great. Also, just to give you a peek behind the curtain, the ESI slack tunnel was off the hook. The ladybugs, the crawfish were probably the most popular species that you showed, but one thing that someone noticed was all of your students will copy in your photos. And I think that's just a great testament to you as a teacher, but also the program and what an amazing experience. So congratulations on that. Brian, with that, sorry. No, no, I say, I basically have to fight to get them in every day. Even as hot as it is now, we have two greenhouses for freshwater and two for saltwater. And so they are out there until the bell rings and we come sprinting in. It's about a, it's about a 30-yard run from the building itself. So we've come running in many a times just for me to run back out with the next group. So it's a lot of fun. That's awesome. We're going to move into our Q&A. We have until 1.15 or so. If we've been getting questions online. So thanks to those in our audience who have been submitting those. But, and if you have questions you haven't yet submitted, you can follow us on Twitter at ESI online or send us an email. ESI at ESI.org. I'm going to introduce my colleague Amber Todorov. She is going to kick off our Q&A today. She's also the organizer, not just of today's briefing, but I'm pretty sure the whole reason we have a workforce Wednesday's briefing series. So we all have her to thank for pulling us together. Amber, I'm going to turn it over to you for the Q&A. Great. Thanks, Dan. And thanks to our awesome speakers. This was, this was great. I really enjoyed listening to these great ideas and programs. So this is the first question is for the group. And some people have more to say about aspects than others. So my question is whether you see a stigma against CT in general. And if you think the environmental angle that you guys work in just decreases that stigma and how. How do we choose who goes? Ben, I guess you can get off. Sure. I would say that culturally there is a stigma about pursuing technical education. Once you finish high school, like I had mentioned in my presentation, there's a lot of emphasis culturally, just the way that we've designed our high schools and a lot of what, and a lot of whatever economy rewards is trying to get people bachelor's degrees. And so I think, you know, what we've heard from the presentations from Brian and Dan that, sorry, Brian and Cody, we were seeing ways that really programs in high school that are thinking outside the box to demonstrate the value of these career paths. And I believe that for these types of programs to be taken up more and really get students at an earlier age to focus on these types of career paths. We do need somewhat of a culture shift. And in order to embrace lifelong learning and the value of just these alternate paths, and that's going to be key to unlocking additional options for building viable careers and salaries. Cody and Brian. Brian. Where you go. I'll go next. Okay, the main thing I was thinking of is like parent connotations maybe of what career and technical education is back in their day. It was maybe just like wood shop or metal shop and it has evolved a lot since then. And I think something that talking with Evergy has kind of made me see is that they want parents to know that if you work at a utility, or if you work for anywhere, you don't necessarily have to do the most dangerous thing there is like, we do need line workers we do people do need people that go and restore the power during a thunderstorm. But we also need like human resource workers and other people that are knowledgeable about renewable energy out there. I think the thing I've seen to you brought up the difference between maybe like what CT is classically versus incorporating this environmental and renewable energy portion. I've seen that there's a lot of stuff out there that's like maybe under the umbrella for energy in the CTE world. And I know that my students are definitely more enthusiastic about pursuing careers in solar and wind than they would be fracking, for instance. So the kids want jobs in solar and wind, but maybe not those like legacy CTE jobs. I'll piggyback on what Cody said. It's not it's not your grandma's CTE as we always say we have we have nine programs at our CTE center that travel anywhere from engineering and robotics to allied health to aquaculture. We have a teacher academy that we run as well and everything is geared directly towards that career field, whether mine would be going into aquaculture or anything biology related. The engineering program is huge. They send to you know universities all over into the mechanical and medical and all those engineering fields. Our allied health teacher is basically putting nurses in the middle of it and she has had she this is her 15th year. I'm sure she had thousands of nurses come out of her program that now are fighting COVID and fighting everything else, you know, doing the positive influence that they have there. We also recently added a shipbuilding Academy to where our students are working with our local Ingalls and some other areas to where they are training and working directly in building and designing aircraft carriers and different ships to where they can put their field of knowledge directly into use after they get out of high school. So that's one of our biggest biggest things here is the fact that they can take a class or, you know, take an environmental class or anything of that line and know exactly where they want to go. Same with Cody. My kids are in as soon as they can. I do a lot of I had to take out like 100 slides out of my presentation, but I do a large thing with eighth graders and seventh graders to where they come tour they come get it, you know, introduced everything and they're ready in eighth grade. You know, they can't take me till their sophomore year because I'm the only one, but the normal state regulations say I can only have 27 kids. So I have to keep it at those numbers. But if we could, you know, like Cody said, they would be in from beginning and run all the way through. It's such a vast amount of knowledge they can gain from any of the CT programs and then be beneficial to them after they get out of school. So yeah, the stigma is kind of changing, but it's still there. Like, like you said, your mom and dad feel like we're just in here building birdhouses, but we're doing many, many more things anywhere close to that. That's great. Next question. So what, what are the biggest barriers to increasing access to CTE in public schools and how can federal agencies better support CTE programs and I guess we can start with Ben again. Well, I would say one of the barriers is is well there's been the shift towards so a lot of high schools traditionally used to put students on certain tracks, they would identify a student say well you're going to be on a vocational track and other students would be on a high school track or sorry a bachelor's degree track. And over time it had that had its own problems of essentially lower middle class students would end up in vocational tracks and upper middle class up class students would be headed to college and so they took a step back from that and and really wanted to open it up to really the opportunity to go to college forever. But the but what what ended up happening was we just ended up having too much of an emphasis on college, I believe, with not without having providing opportunities to have students pursue career and technical education. So I think one of the things that could be done is a lot of our is really provide more funding from the federal and state level for career and technical education. And also, and from a standpoint of the students is really exposing them from a much earlier age of the value of that career and technical education in terms of what what careers they would provide, you know, Cody and Dan. So Cody and Brian provided a good overview just how where their programs lead their students to and to these high growth industries. And so that I believe would provide a lot more interested in pursuing those career paths you know talk about breaking stigma that we've just mentioned. And I believe those combinations of things would go a long way. Thoughts on that Cody and Brian. Well, I was gonna say same thing. It's that it's that money that would be involved in getting the kids in the biggest concept on it would be, you know, going to college. And the college thing that we're lucky and fortunate here with Perkins helps a lot with is we are pro based with our local junior college and local colleges as well to where students who complete my program or students who complete Allied health or robotics or culinary or anything like that are able to go directly into the directly into the field. They can also go to a junior college and get two years free of that junior college, which will allow them pursue before they go to a larger university if they need to. So if they have any reason they want to stay close to home, whether it be a job or grandparents or anything like that. They can do our local junior college to get their first two years of aquaculture or their first two years of whatever it may be and then pursue after that or even go to a large university to get their masters or doctorate. And my internet connection is slightly unstable so if I cut out I'm sorry but I'm thinking at a high level here. I know my district like I said earlier has 30,000 students in it. It's huge and we have we're really fortunate to have the resources that we have. We have someone in our district that's solely aimed at CTE coordination and they have people working in their office so I think there's 30 different 30 plus different programs out there. What I would say though is that there's going to be a lot of school districts that don't have those resources and how can you eliminate as many barriers as possible to adding these new programs for those districts that don't maybe have a CTE program. I know states typically have statewide Department of Education like CTE things so however we can send them information on how to start these programs would be awesome and then having just recently started this program it would be fantastic to give them additional money for equipment when you start something new and the additional funding could maybe go towards that because solar panels are not cheap. Thanks Amber. I'm going to ask a question that came into ESI from our audience. So the question is how do you get the materials for your classes? Do you seek sponsors or do you and whether or not you pull in information online and sort of what those types of resources online might be? That's probably a little bit more for Brian and Cody but Ben I'd love to hear your thoughts too about sort of maybe there's a public-private partnership behind some of these programs. I am a 24 hour day grant writer. Any chance I can find to offset the cost of anything that I may do for my school? Currently the school district itself that I am employed by is currently responsible for about $400 worth of the materials that I own at the high school. I've written over $470,000 worth of grants to pay for what I have installed now. The grants basically base themselves off of local connections or even connections larger than that. My most recent grant was through one of the Department of Marine Resources down here. It was for $150,000 which supplied me with both of the two greenhouses that I have now that added to the other two and were able to expand my oyster production that we have. In the next two years they're building an oyster facility to where they will have oysters available for restoration projects and for food consumption and so I'm getting my students directly involved and directly in line to take those jobs as soon as they're available. So most of mine is done through grant writing. The school district has been responsible for a little more than a power bill and water that I use in the greenhouses. Brian, that's incredible. Yeah, I think definitely again my my district, we're fortunate to have a lot of resources. Our program has a budget, but I've written a lot of grants, maybe not nearly as many as Brian. I got one for a wind tunnel and then another one we've won resources to do energy audits throughout middle schools and different schools in our district. So kind of like listening out for where those are at is a good tip. I do have an advisory board. So I think most career and technical education pathways have advisory boards. So I'm constantly like putting ideas out there for my advisory board and offer up sponsorships. We have an electric vehicle. I don't know if you can, I hesitate to turn you directly into the sun but we have an electric vehicle and I'm going to turn it into like NASCAR basically it sell some sponsorships and different things to get funding for that so definitely not just our own budget that pays for everything. Ben, what do you think Jeff talks about sort of what the proper role what the opportunity here is for private public partnerships around some of these programs. Well, I think what what Brian and Cody are describing is a lot of what we need more broadly and it's it's really a I think of it as kind of you have a partnership between government institutions and business and and some of the funding got to come from the government but having partnerships between businesses and educators directly are important for not only providing the resources that students need to learn but also to help help steer the education training in a direction that will help that best prepare those students for the types of positions and and opportunities that those businesses want to fill. Thanks for that. I really appreciate it. We are at the 115 mark, which means our time together is coming to an end. I have to very sincerely thank Ben, Cody and Brian for your excellent presentations today could not have imagined a better start to workforce Wednesdays. And I really enjoyed sort of hearing your different perspectives on this really important topic and your presentations. Brian and Cody didn't make me nostalgic for high school but I am jealous that I didn't get to go to one of your high schools and I have a good high school. But thanks so much for for bringing all of your insight and perspective with us today. Let me thank Amber as well as the rest of our policy team, Ellen and Anna. Let me thank Omri and Sidney and Daniel Brian and the rest of the team for our help pulling this off today. This is also our first briefing of our fall internship period. So let me thank Emma Hamilton and Joseph for helping out with us. We're not exactly a school but we do try to keep our interns. We've kept our interns around since we've been remote and we couldn't do what we do without them. This is also the last briefing that Grace will be with us. She is departing us tomorrow because we have a long Labor Day weekend. So thanks again to all of her contributions over the summer. If you missed any part of our briefing today, never fear. You can visit us online ESI.org and review and archive written summary slides from today's presentation. If you have a moment and you would be willing to take the survey, there's a link on the screen. It really, really helps us get a sense of what you're thinking in our audience about these briefing topics. We're always looking for ways to improve and it really does help us out a lot. And if you have a few moments, we really, really appreciate that. And then also on social media, you can follow us at EESI online, hashtag EESI talk. And I think especially for today, hashtag Broccoli Overlord. This is the first of five Workforce Wednesday briefings. The next one will be a new spin on Conservation Corps. That's next Wednesday, same time. I hope you'll be able to join us for that. And if you just are looking for the best way to keep up with EESI, all of our briefings, all of our materials, please sign up for our newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. It comes out every other Tuesday and it is chock full of all of climate policy goings on as well as all of the stuff that we're up to at EESI. Well, end there. Ben, Cody and Brian, thanks again. Thanks, Amber. Thanks to the rest of the team for a great start to Workforce Wednesdays. And I wish you all a great rest of your day. And good luck to your students, Brian and Cody. Cody, when they get there and Brian, students you have now, good luck to them. And I hope they have a hope they have a good and productive year. Thanks so much.