 This meeting is now being recorded. This is Kimberly Hamburg, and we're going to get started in just a minute. Thank you all. Look at afternoon. This is Kimberly Hamburg with the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center, and I want to welcome you to our webinar. I'm going to leave the screen up for a second if you're having issues with styling into the audio. You probably can't hear me. But we have the number and the access code there in the chat box for everyone. And we're going to go ahead and pull over the number for connecting to Adobe Connect if you have any issues as we're moving forward. So again, welcome to Kentucky. Get students on track with you apprenticeship. I'm really excited to have this webinar get started. I've asked, we've asked you all in the beginning to please mute your phone. If we have any issues with that, just please do star six to mute your phone so we can give the line for the presenters to talk. As I said early on, my name is Kimberly Hamburg. I'm the Associate Director with the ARC. The ARC is the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center. We are designed to work with four states, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia in partnership with the SBAs on initiatives that improve education for students, close any achievement gaps, and enhance structural quality. One of our key areas is implementing college and career readiness standards and aligned with high quality assessments for all students. And our webinar with Kentucky marks the third webinar in our series on CTE and partnership with advanced CTE. And I now would like to ask our partner, Andrew, to introduce herself and her organization. Thanks, Kimberly. And before we get started, I really want to just give a special thanks to you and your team at the Comprehensive Center for this great partnership we've had over the last year and the three webinars that we've done on work-based learning. A little bit about advanced CTE. We represent the state-level leaders who oversee CTE programs and policies at the secondary, post-secondary, and adult learner levels. We support an innovative, high-quality CTE system through leadership, advocacy, and partnerships. And our work with the Comprehensive Center is a great example of one of those partnerships. So a series that we've done over the last year has been all about work-based learning. And work-based learning really has gotten a lot of attention nationally and at the state and local levels because it's been a great way to bring relevancy to students' classroom learning, let them explore different careers and what that would look like and get them access to the workplace. And while there's much work to be done at the local level to create and sustain these opportunities, there's also a role for the state. And particularly as it considers how work-based learning fits into career pathways and programs of study. So the work that we're going to hear about today in Kentucky is a really great example of how one state has done this. One other note I'd like to make is that for the past year, Advanced CTE has released a series of briefs that look at the state's role in work-based learning. We have four briefs that are now out there that really look at the range from setting a vision for work-based learning all the way to how you're measuring these experiences. And youth apprenticeships really, if you were thinking about work-based learning on that continuum of experiences, youth apprenticeships and apprenticeships are at the furthest end at the most intensive level of work-based learning experiences. So later this month, you're going to also see a work-based learning guide that comes out to help further this work that everyone is doing. And you can find all this information as well as those four briefs on our website at careertech.org and our Learning That Works Resource Center. And so with that, I will pass it back to Kimberly to introduce our speakers. Great. Thank you, Andrea. And just to let the participants know, you'll see a box there that's a chat for everyone where Caitlin has been putting information about the dial-in number and to mute your phone. If at any point during the webinar you have some questions, please put your questions in that box. We will be monitoring the questions we have, Q and A at the end. We probably will not be able to get through all the questions on the webinar, but we do follow up with those questions afterwards. So put your questions when they pop up. I'm very excited to be able to work with this great group from Kentucky. We have the presenters here that are really focusing on the Kentucky track program. You can see here that it's a partnership with the Kentucky Labor Cabinet and the Department of Education. Mike Donta is the Deputy Commissioner Supervisor of Apprenticeship. He's going to kick us off. Laura Arnold is the Acting Associate Commissioner in the Office of Career and Technical Education at KDE. Mary Taylor is Industry Training and Development Specialist with KDE and Kay Moss is the Director of Human Resources at Stover Drive, which is one of the organizations that hires some of the apprentices. Mike. Thank you and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm going to get us started here and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about registered apprenticeship under the assumption that many of us know at least basically what that is. In Kentucky we like to call it the GOAT standard of work-based learning. It's incorporating the on-the-job training with technical, related technical instruction and it results in a highly skilled productive workforce. Actually it's on-the-job training that is mentored by a subject matter expert that shares and demonstrates their knowledge with the apprentice. The related technical instruction or classroom instruction is a minimum of 144 hours a year in Kentucky and is provided to the apprentice and a successful completion results in earning a national certification in the apprentice occupation. Apprenticeship is regulated and operated by the best Department of Labor, but they pass that authority on to states who operate their own program. Kentucky is one of 27 who do operate their own program and we act as a regulator and facilitator for the model. Here in Kentucky and all across the country we're seeing that there's a shortage of middle and high skilled workers in numerous industries including the building trades, healthcare information technology, customer service and many other occupations. Not only is there an immediate need for term realization, we've got to continue to train more individuals with specific skill sets and we must do it very quickly. I'm going to turn this over to Laura Arnold. Laura is with the Kentucky Department of Education to talk to us a little bit more about college and career accountabilities. Good afternoon and I want to thank Kimberly and Andrea for giving Kentucky the opportunity to share some of what we consider best practices across the state of Kentucky when we look at our K-12 education system. So in order to incentivize youth apprenticeship models it was very critical that students to go through this pipeline would be recognized in our K-12 accountability model and we would incentivize districts to implement youth apprenticeship models. So to kind of help you understand the foundation of this we wanted to take a few minutes to talk to you about what college and career readiness accountability looks like in the K-12 system in Kentucky. So students are identified as college ready, career ready or college and career ready. And to be college ready a student must meet benchmarks on college entrance exams in Kentucky that is historically in the ACT and then if a student does not meet that benchmark there is opportunities to take state-developed assessment the CODI or the ACT product COMPAS and if they don't meet the ACT benchmark there is remediation time to work with that student to try to move forward and take the COMPAS exam. So college ready that student has met her benchmark in that college entrance exam area. But in addition to that students have the opportunity to be identified as career ready. And this is where career and technical education in the state has put much of our focus over the past three to four years. And career readiness is for those students who are preparatory in a career and technical education career pathway. So that means these are students who have completed two credits and enrolled in their third credit in a CTE pathway. And in order for those students to be deemed career ready they must have made a silver or higher on the national career readiness certificate which is three assessments from the work keys assessment ACT work keys. They have made a 50 on the ASQT of the ASAB so they have to meet one of those work keys or ASAB plus they have to have an industry certification or they must pass one of our Kentucky design tests which is referenced as COSA on this slide which is the Kentucky Occupational Skills Standards Assessment. So how does this relate to our track program in the state? If a student successfully completes the track pathway then that is recognized as industry certification in the state of Kentucky. So this incentivizes school districts to provide this opportunity in this pathway for their students because it can impact their college and career readiness score within the accountability system. So if you look at our next slide it kind of helps identify in Kentucky how CTE is playing an active role in filling the skills gap. If you look at some of our big data 98% of Kentucky CTE concentrators graduate from high schools so 98% of those students who are enrolled in that third credit bearing course within a CTE pathway do graduate and that was based on our graduates of the 2015 class. Workforce trend data is being used to design our pathways in Kentucky before we design career pathways or add additional pathways or we delete pathways. We look at labor data and we determine what are our high industry sector areas and where do we need to be putting resources to create pathways that align secondary, post-secondary in the workforce and where does money and resources need to go to support the workforce pipeline. We also have evidence that students in a career pathway have a good base knowledge. We want to ensure they have the academic skills as a foundation but in addition have that skill base set within that specific pathway and that's where the TRIP program has become a critical part of our career pathway development. And as a result of the TRIP program Kentucky also worked to revitalize our work-based learning manual in the state of Kentucky because when we looked at that manual it hadn't been updated in several years and apprenticeships were not recognized in that manual and we wanted to ensure that school districts were very much aware that when we talk about work-based learning, as Mike said, the goal standard is that apprenticeship model so those students are getting that academic connection and classroom connection to on-the-job training. And when I think about how this program developed Mary and Mike were very critical but also our former state director, Vail Winkler, who now works for the Southern Regional Education Board was an integral partner in helping get that developed so we had great leadership to get the ball rolling with this work. So at this time I'm going to turn it over to Mary and she's going to get into the weeds on how this was developed and how we made this available to students in Kentucky. Thank you, Laura. Good afternoon everyone from Frankfurt, Kentucky. We're really excited to talk to you about our track program and we here in Kentucky really like our tracks, Churchill, Downs, and Keeneland but this one is actually for students. So let's talk about the snapshot of this as a youth apprenticeship program for secondary students. I think we've all gathered that. Our partnership with the Kentucky Labor Cabinet with the registering agency here in Kentucky for apprenticeship it utilizes the current career and technical education infrastructure at no cost. That is one of the elements that we're really excited about. It creates a seamless career pathway for students into post-secondary opportunities and it creates a pipeline of students with a good foundation and interest in the occupation. And to go along with what Laris was talking about with our college and career accountability model this provides an industry certification that is issued by the Kentucky Labor Cabinet. So how does this work? The employer will register a program with the Labor Cabinet and then they will work with the school to be identified, to identify the students. And they will also, the employer also has some flexibility in what technical school they work with or what programs, the local schools that offer the programs that they need. So this is not bound by county lines. The employer has the option to choose schools in their region. They will choose a minimum of a four-course sequence and that is where we have kind of had to get out of our comfort zone, if you will, because students traditionally in our programs, if they are in a welding program or a machining program, et cetera, they would have to stay in that career pathway. Well, one of the requests that I kept hearing from employers was that they wanted some flexibility in those courses and they need a more well-rounded student. So actually they get to choose the courses, the manufacturing courses that the school offers. They get to choose the students and they can look at their grades, at their transcripts, at their attendance. They can interview them. They have a lot of say in who gets into this program. They will determine if the student successfully completes the program. You know, this is not a dumping ground, if you will, to dump students. We are actually trying to get employers our best students and if they don't do what they're supposed to do, then they will be exited from the program. On the job hours that should be credited, that is one of the best parts of the marriage, of CTE and apprenticeship, if you will, where the hands-on learning on the job hour for hour will get credited towards that student post-secondarily. And then the post-secondary requirements are to be determined by the employer. So we feel that that is the best practice here in Kentucky we have found that is actually a stackable credential of a journey person certificate and an associate's degree, but that is to be determined by the employer. I do want to touch again on the on-the-job credit hours credited. Just recently, we had some students, senior students, graduate, and two of them had 16 and 1,700 hours that they graduated with towards their apprenticeship. So they started as a junior. They worked between the summer of their junior and senior year and they worked quite a bit that senior year. So that's a pretty good example. And if you look at pay rate for those students making $10 an hour, they graduated making about $17,000 an hour before they even graduated. Okay, so next slide. The apprenticeship is recognized as a valuable post-secondary option for students, and this is by counselors and parents, school administration. We've had to gain some ground there and they are definitely seeing this as a viable post-secondary option. The career pathway leads to gainful employment. The student graduates and would immediately enter the workforce as a full-time employee or apprentice. So that is, for say, on Friday afternoon, they would graduate from high school and on Monday they would walk in with the full-blown apprenticeship. The students are prepared for the local workforce and this creates a competitive working environment among students. Our best students are asking to do this program. We can't get employers signed up fast enough because the students are competing to be in this program. So what are the results that we are seeing? We're seeing a lot more work-based learning opportunities through co-ops and that is a factor for the track program, for an employer-based track program. I'll talk about a training program based in just a minute. Dual and articulated credit is accepted if applicable. So let me give you another example that we recently had. The two students that I was telling you about that graduated with 16 and 1,700 hours of OJT, they also had, one of them had 30 hours of articulated credit. So that saved he and the company about a year towards an associate's degree. So that saved them a lot of time and money. And then we are having... I'm sorry, I skipped around the employability skills. We enforce the employability skills. So I have myself and these students have seen how responsible they are, how they show up on time and they have snow days. They don't just call in and can't be to work. They actually have to use vacation time, et cetera, et cetera. The employers are registering programs just to participate in the track program. And then another result is it offers an opportunity for students to decide if this is the right time for them in their career pathway. Because the big complaint that we hear from employers is they train and leave them. And we hope that this will reduce a lot of that because that employee will be tested before they graduate. And so this student should know if this is right for them. And if it's not, then this is definitely the time for both parties to find out. So when we first started this, we did not know the shape or form that it was going to take. And we actually have seen this going to two track pathways. We first started out in manufacturing with an employer-based pathway. And that's where the employer chooses the courses. They choose the students. They offer a co-op and they determine that student completed. Well, then we had the field trades groups come to us and say, if we already are doing registered apprenticeship and we want the same pipeline for your students, so what would we have to do to create this? So we had to put our thinking caps back on and again, try to trial and error the model. But what this looks like now is a four-course pre-selected pathway that our industry partners chose. The student will complete an end-of-program assessment. So basically, there's an end game if it's an employer apprenticeship, they determine, or if it's skills, grades, apprenticeship, there's an end-of-program assessment that our employers helped us create. The industry certificate results in an interview by the partners and if they are accepted, their classroom and the OJT hours is at the discretion of the training entity. But there is no co-op with the training program. So let's look at our numbers. In manufacturing, we have approximately 40 students that have either completed or in the pipeline since 2013. So this is a pretty new, we piloted this in 2013. And in the skill trades, we have approximately 300 students that are in that pipeline. So that means they are in this career pathway, and that's pre-selected four courses. And so there's a lot of interest in that. Just quickly to kind of give you an idea of who our electrical partners are for the skill trades. We have both union and non-union groups. We have the IBW, we have IEC, and we have ANTEC, and then our carpentry partners are the IKORCC, carpenters and mill rights, and then master construction, and the welding partners are plums and pipe fitters. But anyone can join at any time. Any training program can join at any time as long as they offer registered apprenticeships. So employers in the trades are now, once you start an employer-based track program. And it sounds like I'm getting in the weeds and getting complicated. It is, but yet it is such a golden opportunity for our students. So this has just kind of happened. Actually, I just was on a phone call about it yesterday. We have employers in the trades, commercial, that are starting registered apprenticeship programs that are now offering co-ops to these students. So again, it's not a training program, it's an employer-based co-op. So we have this going on currently in electrical and in construction because they don't want the training partner entities to come in and recruit these students away. So it's getting very interesting, but the bottom line, it is a golden opportunity for our students. Before that, we turned it over to KMOS. They are an employer. Sober Dawes is an employer that we work with out of Mayfield, Kentucky, and she's going to talk about their interests in the track program, but I want to go ahead and recognize them as they got a mention, or mentioned them as an industry week in the publication. They are a leader in apprenticeship in the August 22nd edition of that. And we hope that more employers will replicate their philosophy and their approach. And I believe there is a link to that article at the end of this PowerPoint. It's okay. I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you, Mary. Can everybody hear me okay? Yes, Kimberley. And if we need to advance your slides, let us know. I'm not sure if you're connected yet. Yes, if you could advance my slides, that would be great. I'm not having very good connectivity here. I want to talk about our apprenticeship program. We started an actual apprenticeship program back in 2005, and Mary came to us and said, hey, this is the end in life. And said, hey, you know, we've got a new great opportunity with track where we can take students out of high school and have them kind of co-op with you as they can when they're going to the area technology center. And so I was like, okay, I sound like a great program because by the time we wait until we get through high school and they choose a college, they may go to college at UofL or some out of state college and they never come back to Mazeville. So anybody who's having issues with recruiting who want to recruit young, talented people straight, you know, while they're in high school is a great program. So we started with benefits to the company and the students. The students are already in the area technology center. They're already getting their hands dirty. They're very well prepared. So when they come on the job, they're immediately more productive than even some of the people who've been there for, you know, a few months or a year. We hired two of the track students full-time upon graduation. We're paying for their tuition and books class time. It's a debt-free education for the apprentice. And then the benefit to the company is they're bringing those great ideas that they're learning in college and applying those on the job. So they're outperforming their peers because of their education, but also their hands-on training with their mentor. If you'll have the next slide of benefits to the company and the students, we can tailor the curriculum. We work with the area technology center and say we want them to have machine shop A, for example, or we say we want them to have principles of accounting one, but we go to the area technology center and pick the classes and the things that we want them to learn, when we want them to learn those things, and then they're also learning that on the job at the same time. So they're learning it in school in theory, but then in application when they come on the job. They roughly have been working about 10 hours per week while they're at the area technology center. So two to three days a week, they'll come to work and actually apply what they're learning in school. The students are given a glimpse of the working environment and how a company runs. They're also paid for their time on the job, and they're accumulating hours toward an apprenticeship while getting the dual credit that was talked about earlier. So there's lots of benefits to the company and to the student. Lessons learned. We have to be more flexible in our hours because some students go to school in the morning. They go to the area technology center in the morning, or maybe they go in the afternoon. So we have to have our mentors be a lot more flexible with their hours. We also have to highly supervise them on the job because they are under 18 to make sure that they're working in a safe environment and making sure they're doing things safely. And then the high school also are giving them a lot of supervision at the high school. And communication between the area technology center and the student is the key to success of the program. We started actually with five pre-apprentices or track students. We hired two of those. And one of the five came in. He wanted to be an electrical engineer. And so we said, okay. And he decided after about eight months that, hey, this electrical engineering thing is not for me. So that was a win, believe it or not, because the student could have gone on to college and spent a lot of money and a lot of time and effort to realize that that position was not for them. Another student was machining. We had two machining students. We knew the one at the time was not super mature, but most 16, 17-year-old kids are not. So we knew that in the interview stage, but we thought, hey, we can mentor this guy. We can bring him along, giving him the experience that he needs. But that didn't work out. But luckily he did find another job immediately out of school. We didn't bring him on. And then we still have one track student enrolled in the program at this time in electrical engineering. And he has a very good chance of becoming full-time. So we had the two students that did become full-time upon graduation, was machining, and then materials. So I know materials isn't trade, but that doesn't matter. That's what she was interested in. So we are sending her on to Murray to get a logistics degree. So she'll spend a couple of years at KCTCS in Maysville and then transfer on to Murray. So future opportunities, this is the next slide. So as you know, as we demonstrated, track is not limited to the trade. We do have a material slash logistics track student that is now full-time. Murray, after she finishes her two-year degree, which she's got like 20-plus hours already through bill credit. The things that we need to do is standardize the curriculum, the internal training, and testing so that it is recognized, not only statewide but also nationally and maybe even internationally at some point. But if the student can get that recognition, so if they were to leave us at some point, they're more marketable to more businesses. More future opportunities. This is a picture of West. I think he's one of our track students that graduated and got full-time. But this is how we are advertising now to local schools, principals, guidance counselors, and parents in hopes of getting more students interested. We've created some flyers. We're visiting whoever will talk to us about the track program and telling about our successes and hoping to get more companies on board because the more companies we get to participate, we're creating a higher demand for educational resources, and that contributes also to our work-ready initiative. So at this time, I'll turn it back over to Mary. Thank you, Kay. We certainly appreciate SOBER as a partner in the track program and everything that they are doing to help promote this so we can get other employers on board. I want to talk about lessons that we have learned on both sides of the house, and I want to start with educators. One of the things that first had to happen is we had to get educators getting out of their comfort zone and getting out of that traditional post-secondary mindset of a traditional degree. So we've had to do a lot of that, and then the schools are being held to a higher level of accountability. They are actually being held accountable to business and industry. So the third one is that we have program changes that are needed, and we need to offer what business and industry needs, and to echo what Laura said earlier, our programs need to be based around data and what is needed statewide, regionally, and locally. So let's look at this from the employer perspective. Again, I was the girl from education that had quite a bit to learn about apprenticeship. I was an apprentice and apprenticeship, I'd like to say, but now I believe that I'm a journey person, Mike. Not yet. And so we have... There was a big misconception about apprenticeships and that it was only for construction, it was only for union, I heard repeatedly. So we in Kentucky now are kind of working on getting a team together to help spread the word about it being a successful training tool. And I touched on this earlier about training and leading, and I love to feel the labor cabinet's line on this, you know, what if I train them and they leave and they like to say, what if you don't train them and they stay? Violation of child labor laws, we have extensively researched that. And actually the labor cabinet is where they also regulate labor laws here in Kentucky, and they actually issued an opinion on this stating that if it's part of a structured training program such as a co-op or an apprenticeship, that it is not in violation of child labor laws, and actually child labor laws are more lenient and will allow for more. And then once it got past that, then it was kind of like, well, this is against our company policy. And you know, my answer to that is all of this was against our policy. But policy's meant to be revised, reviewed, and rewritten, and we completely revamped our policy manual to allow for this and actually had to add a chapter on apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship. One of the sticking points that we found out early on was the workers' compensation liability insurance. And to combat that, we actually have a partnership now with a Deco employment agency. And this started here in Kentucky, but they would like to replicate it nationally. And they will actually employ these students. They will be on their workers' comp and on their payroll. So they mitigate the employer's risk, and they are on a Deco's workers' compensation policy. So we've actually had some good success with this. It has created a lot of opportunities and a lot of different occupations. They have hired a yes coordinator. And so we would like to see that program grow here, not only in Kentucky, but nationally to create more opportunities for students. So if you will see, we've laid some tracks here, and this is another employer partner that we work with. And this is actually Dr. Schneider Automotive and Russell Springs. And they are here with Kentucky's governor and the secretary of labor, Derek Ramsey. They have been in a study. They've been noted in a study recently, and I don't know if Andrea wants to talk about that a little bit more at the end. But Kentucky was chosen as one of six that is making connection between career and technical education and registered apprenticeship. And then our goal for the track program is we want to get to the point that if any employer wants to implement a registered apprenticeship program, we can develop a pipeline at the secondary level utilizing track. So on the short term, we would like to get into healthcare, business, IT. We are already seeing some instances, again, like sober drives where manufacturing is actually getting into some of those nontraditional occupations. And we would like to grow it, you know, even as far as some of our culinary students becoming an apprentice chef. So really the sky is the limit for this program, and we're excited to see about how it grows and where it takes us. All right. Thank you so much to everyone there in Kentucky who took the time another day to share with us what you guys are doing. In Kentucky, we've had a lot of questions come in, and I'll just make a plug now and say if you have additional questions, keep sending them in. We have about 25 minutes to do some Q&A, and I think we'll have a really robust conversation here. So I actually wanted to start first with Kay, and, you know, you mentioned that you took on five track students. You hired two of them, and a few of them along the way realized it wasn't for them and another one who just wasn't a good fit for your company. But I think a lot of the questions around sort of apprenticeships and work-based learning even in general, but is about the return on investment for employers. It's definitely a question that employers bring a lot to say, like, what's in it for me. So at Stuber Drive, have you, you know, quantified what return on investment looks like for you? Actually, it's not. There's an ROI calculator that I think the Kentucky DOL is creating, but it's definitely a value add. So you can take people and train them to do what you want them to do, and they can go to school and bring back great ideas and implement those. Or you can not train them and they can stay there anyway and not move your company forward. So to put numbers on it, no. But we are in the people development business. I mean, we have to be. That's your cutting edge. That's what makes you different than your competition. So you can sit still or you can, you know, move forward with your business, and we choose to move forward. And I want to skip over to Mike for a second and, you know, ask, because one of the things that you brought up was, or I think that's what Mary mentioned, that TRAC has also helped to sort of incentivize not only school districts and area technology centers to participate in TRAC, but also it's incentivized employers to register their existing apprenticeship programs so that they're eligible to participate in TRAC. I think that many states would agree that non-registered apprenticeships are a constant struggle. And one of the questions we had come across was about how you are dealing with non-registered apprenticeships at the state level. How are you targeting them and supporting them to make that registration possible? Well, as I pan my portion of the discussion, we call registered apprenticeships the gold standard. If they're not registered, we're willing to work with any company to get them in spec. We know the quality of registered apprenticeship are at the top of the model, so we are more than willing to reach out to anybody. But to be involved in the TRAC program, they must be a registered program through Kentucky and with the U.S. Department of Labor. And also, does Kentucky participate in the registered apprenticeship college consortium at the TRAC, as it's been called? Well, our community college system is divided up into independent colleges across the state. And we have only one at this time that's participating. Our office has reached out to the U.S. Department of Labor for some technical support and assistance in explaining the process better to the community college and to try to get them all involved. And I would actually like to follow up on that. I'm not sure if she's on the collar or not, but Dr. Amy Firestone with the Office of Apprenticeship, USDOL, is actually coming in next week. And we are going to be visiting the community technical college system and some post-secondary institutions to try to get them to register. Okay, great. And Mary, while I have you here, one of the questions that just came across from Caitlin is what are the sort of other barriers that states and districts and schools might face when implementing these type of programs? Well, I think I've pretty much listed most of the barriers, but I do think flexibility is a key. And that is flexibility not only among the employer but the school, the superintendent. Just to give you another example, we have a school that is going to probably go to a three-two schedule for these students, meaning they are going to actually work three days a week and go to school two days a week. So that's new for us here. And we're really excited about that and just kind of throwing that box out of the window. And you also mentioned very briefly about cooperative experiences. And can you kind of talk a little bit about co-ops in Kentucky and how TRAC has really changed what the co-ops mean? Actually, I'm going to turn that one over to Laura. That's okay. As I mentioned on one of our slides, when we started in the planning process of the TRAC program, we knew it was time to revamp our work-based learning manual. So we have revamped that manual, and we hope that this will help increase the importance in the need for cooperative education placements. But if it's not just co-ops placement, it also helps with any type of work-based learning, whether that be job shadow, mentorship, internships. But as Mary stated, as a result of TRAC, that has created the yes agreement, which is removing the barrier of companies not allowing students under the age of 18 into their facilities. So we feel like this is a big win because when a company brings up that barrier, we do have a solution that we can offer to them if they choose to go that route. And we're seeing that yes agreement used not just in the apprenticeship program, but among all of our CTE cooperative education experiences. And just very, very briefly, could you define what a cooperative experience is? Because not everyone on the webinar may know. So in Kentucky, cooperative education experience for our students is on-the-job training and they're on-the-job work site for six months or more, and it is a paid experience. A student can be on the job site for less than six months or many hours a week, but if you get me on that six months, we consider it a cooperative education placement and the student does have to be paid. So on the topic of being paid, actually, we've got a question that just came across. Was there any... Did you encounter any barriers when asking employers to pay their students? And if so, how did you work through that? Yes, absolutely. You know, again, unfortunately, we have to talk to... have some hard conversations with employers sometimes that are kind of looking for cheap child labor, and that's certainly not what this program is about. And then also, we've had some barriers with the Yes program, where employers have wanted to use that program to supplement their work force. So, for instance, if, you know, a packing business is busy, Christmas time, they need 50 seats. That's not what this is about. This is tied to a true work-based learning career pathway opportunity. I would say it's a partnership. One of the barriers, too, if you guys don't care about me chiming in here, for employers could be registration. You know, if you think about government, it's red tape. It was actually easy. I couldn't believe it. Mike Hichu came down and walked us through the process. It took just about an hour, so it wasn't really cumbersome at all, which I was shocked. Sorry, Mike, but I was shocked at how easy it was to get registered. That's great. And I think that's a great segue to kind of talking about perceptions about apprenticeships. One of the questions that came across was kind of about how you and Kentucky are breaking down those perceptions about apprenticeships for, you know, parents, students, et cetera, how you've seen track change that, and also someone else asked about if you have any marketing materials. You do have marketing materials. We can send also, but go ahead, Mike. Yeah, we have developed marketing materials also, and there's a nationwide initiative to actually address the misconceptions and to bring the parents aboard. One of our programs, actually several of our programs have opened the doors to parents to come in and take a look, to realize that, you know, especially in the manufacturing facilities, they're not dark and dirty any longer. They're clean. They're high-tech. They're impressive, actually, to see, but that's a misconception that's nationwide, and the U.S. Department of Labor, along with all the cooperative states, are working to try to change that mindset of parents and educators. You know, let's be quite honest. This program wouldn't have worked if we didn't have the partnership that we have currently with the Department of Education, and I certainly want to give credit to Dr. Winkler, I believe is still on the call with us without his realization that we had to look at this with an open mind and had to do things a little differently. We wouldn't be as successful as we are now. So thanks, Dale. I know you can hear me, so... But it's all about building partnerships and building relationships between the school systems and with the employers. And as far as marketing... I'm sorry. And also what parent doesn't want to get free education? That's very exhilarating to all parents. They're still going to get educated, and they're getting this on-the-job component. I mean, that's very appealing, and we use that as our thing, too. And as far as marketing the track program, yes, I believe it's at the end of this web... at the end of the webinar, we have some material... we have a website. There are some materials on there. There's some information about the YES program. But yes, we are marketing track and apprenticeship simultaneously to the school system. Yes, Mary. This is Kimberly. I was going to point that out, that, you know, all participants will get a follow-up to this email that will have the link to not only the archive webinar, but the materials we have already and presenters that will have other marketing materials that they're willing to share if they don't have a site to put them. We can put them in this folder, as well. Great. And I actually just advanced the slide so folks can see the URL. That's fair, but we are not done. We still have 14 minutes to go, so if your question's coming, if you have some. So one of the questions we just got is always an important one when it comes to new programs and new initiatives, but it's about sustainability. And, you know, what... what have you done at the state level to make sure that this is sustainable and something that can continue, and, you know, not something that once employers feel that, you know, they've got a good workforce, they don't need this anymore, you know, that they continue their participation as well? So from a sustainability perspective at the state level, both the labor cabinet and the Department of Education had existing staff, Mary and Mike, who could assist with this work. So it involved changing a little bit of the job responsibilities of Mary, especially on the Department of Education in, but we had existing staff that could get the ball rolling and support these efforts from the Department of Education. And I think from the labor cabinet and their... we've been able to use Mike, and I think additional staff, Mike, if you want to touch on that, is being hired to support initiatives around apprenticeship so I think we'll just help this continue to grow. But before I turn it over to Mike from a graduate's perspective, there isn't much cost to schools and districts to implement this because we're using our current curriculum, our current standards within those pathways, and this just becomes a natural part of those that are endorsed by local industry, that I will let Mike touch on what the labor cabinet's doing as far as sustainability. Well, and we're doing what we can to expand our agency. We've gotten some state funds, some federal funds, and the governor has actually appropriated $100 million for workforce development in our state, and some of that's going to be directed towards registered apprenticeship. So we feel very encouraged by that, but there's a national trend right now to promote registered apprenticeship across this country and to grow it. Our goal is to double apprenticeship from the 2014-15 levels through 2020, and that would put us pretty close to a million apprentices across this country. So this is not a Fly the Night program. It has sustained itself for over 75 years in this country, and I'd expect that the apprenticeship piece will continue. Now, as far as our pathways, career pathways with our high school students, this is a perfect opportunity to not only to get those students into a life-sustaining career, but also to offer them the opportunity to, as a stackable credential, to move on even further to further their career in different occupations if they choose to do so. So as long as career and technical schools don't go away, and apprenticeships don't go away, the sustainability factor will remain, and I believe continue to grow here. Great. I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, no, go ahead. Do you want to add something? Well, I just, I was reading the questions and I was going to just to touch on one of those, but go ahead and we'll follow up if we have time. All right. Well, actually, my question was to Laura, and that is, you know, at the state level at the Department of Education, you know, how do you track and collect data on this program, and then how are you using it to know, you know, is it working, et cetera? So from a CTE K-12 perspective, we have our technical education database system that we keep data on our career pathways, and we use that for federal reporting for Perkins' accountability, too. So we know what schools have the program and what students are in those pathways, and we can follow those students throughout that K-12 system. Now, once the student graduates in Kentucky, we have a longitudinal database system that is managed by the Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics, and we can actually follow those students throughout the apprenticeship process. We know the wage they're making. We know if they're staying in that field. And actually, we have a very young report from last year that acknowledged our students who were enrolled in that first year of the track program were making a higher wage than any student who had graduated in Kentucky, career-ready, that was employed. So that speaks volumes about those students in the apprenticeship program, just in regards to their wage alone. And actually, this is Mary, and if I could just add to what Laura said as far as tracking is unintended, there is also a track application that must be filled out, and it must be signed off by all parties, parents, student, employer, school, and me. So that way, I will check to see, make sure that they have to go ahead and talk about the courses that they're going to take and the stipulations. And so once that is approved through me, then the school is able to enter that information into our database system. And that application can actually be found on the website. Great. So I wanted to also ask about sort of non-traditional occupations for apprenticeships. You know, the skilled trades has, you know, been doing apprenticeships for years. Manufacturing is kind of this new field that folks are also getting into, but there's a lot of things that are easily translatable. But in Kentucky, you did mention very briefly that you're, you know, looking to expand this into non-traditional occupations. But at the Department of Ed, as well as in the Labor Cabinet, what are your efforts in this space and are there any kind of difficulties or growing pains in getting this model to fit into a non-traditional occupation? This is Mike, and I just want to touch on that somewhat. We have been working with some of our healthcare providers across the state to get into the healthcare field. You know, we all recognize the need that's in that industry, and that is absolutely non-traditional for apprenticeships. You know, most of those occupations are licensed occupations. But we've been working with the Hospital Association and some of our leading healthcare entities in our state. And I can't say too much at this point, but next month we're going to be kicking off an announcement of a statewide scale-up for some healthcare occupations. And we're very excited about that. All of our area technology centers across the state, I believe all of them, have the Health Sciences Pathway, which will fit right into the track pathway into a partnership. We expect to do that actually here in just a couple of weeks. Our governor is going to make that announcement as he visits this large facility, and we do a press release on what we're doing. Not only that, we're doing some customer service stuff. Kay's Group at Stover Drives kind of helped us kick that off with some of the non-traditional things that they're doing. We're doing some early childhood education statewide scale-ups that we're going to actually announce again in the next month or so that we're doing. We've got a lot of things going on behind the scenes. We can't release to you yet, but it's very exciting about where we're headed with this in Kentucky. Stay tuned. That could be webinar number two. Also, from the track perspective, as far as developing this, we've kind of been on a trial-and-error basis building the plane as we're flying it. I think we kind of, again, have it nailed down to basically a four-course career pathway with a co-op. I don't know what that looks like until we get into some other areas as to what it needs to be tweaked. We did need to tweak the skilled trades, so that's kind of one of those trial-and-error we'll see. But we are very willing and able to build it, but we'll just have to cross that bridge when it comes. Could you actually talk? What sort of tweaks did you have to do to make the skilled trades one work? So the co-op was not going to be an option for the skilled trades for a couple of different reasons. A deco does not cover all of the skilled trades occupations for one. And for two, those training programs, a lot of times are centralized in urban areas or regionally. And so it's just too hard sometimes in a rural area to offer a co-op for a training program. But to keep the integrity of the program, we still had to have an end game, because to refresh your memory, the co-op is the end game for the four-course sequence that's an employer-based track. And so for the skilled trades track, it's a four-course sequence that have been pre-selected by our partners, and then those students take an end of program assessment. And so, again, that end of program assessment has been very valuable in providing data to us about where we need to strengthen our programs and some gaps that we have in meeting industry needs. So we actually do item analysis. We've done that in the past two years to see how we need to strengthen and get our teachers some more resources. In particular, for instance, we feel like we are too heavy and residential for our carpentry programs. And so now we are looking at implementing more commercial standards. Great. Well, I don't have any other questions, but I want to give an opportunity to all the panelists who are on the call. If there's one last piece of advice you could, you know, give from your perspective, you know, at the Labor Cabinet, the department, as an employer to the folks on the webinar that they should think about if they wanted to do something like this in their states. Mike, can we start with you? Well, I think being willing to be flexible. That's what we've done with our cabinet. You know, it's... This is an employer-based program, and we're willing to work with the employers to make it happen, to fit their needs. And I think that's probably one of the most important aspects of this. All right. Great. And, okay, as the employer, what about you? I would say if they're interested, come benchmark our program or Dr. Snyder. But get in under other businesses and look around and see how it's working for them and see how you can apply it in your own business. Okay. And Mary and Laura? My biggest piece of advice coming from a state level would be that education has to listen to the employer. So this is an employer-led initiative, and education has to listen to what the employer needs and then figure out a way to be flexible like Mike said to make it happen. And Laura and Mike took both of my answers. Perfect. That's how you've got everyone, you know, on the same page with you. All right. Well, with that, I want to thank everyone who joined us today, and I want to toss it back to Kimberly to do a wrap-up. Great. Thank you, Andrea. And first and foremost, I do want to thank the presenters, Mike, Laura, Mary, and Kay. You did a great job. I knew when we were talking about this and planning it, it was going to be lively and insightful. And, you know, you guys, thank you. I think the participation and the questions just shows that people are really interested in what is happening in Kentucky. Andrea, thank you again for partnering with the ARC on this three days. I think we've got this, you know, taken care of. We've got one more case that we're going to focus on, so that would be great. And I, in particular, want to thank the participants who took the time today to spend with us this hour to listen about the program. As we said, there'll be a follow-up where you'll get a copy of the link for the archive webinar. Kim is going to be moving over the link for the evaluation. We would like you to take a minute to complete the evaluation survey for us. You'll also get a link to it in the follow-up email, but it's really important for us to find out what the participants of our webinar think and how we can improve it in the future. So again, I thank you all for spending time with us. If there are some questions in the chat that we didn't answer, we will get those back out with the follow-up email. So thank you all.