 While being recorded. I've got something to give you. I'm on vacation next week and I want to get this form to you that you know. Good afternoon. This is Kimberly Hambrick. It is now 2 o'clock and I want to get our webinar started. I want to do a few housekeeping items in that we did try to mute all the participants' lines, but we had an issue with one of our presenters not being able to speak. So I would like to ask all the participants to please mute their phone lines. Either mute it by your button on your phone or do star 6 which works with the system. I thank you so much for understanding why we'd like to have all the phone lines muted and keep some of the distractions at a minute. So again, this is Kimberly Hambrick and I thank you again for muting your phone lines. I want to welcome you all to the simulated workplace changing CTE in West Virginia. I'm the associate director of the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center and we're putting this webinar on in partnership with my colleague from the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education. I'll introduce her better here in a second. I apologize. Something popped up on my screen. Before we get started, I do want to follow a few housekeeping items. As I said, we would like for you all to mute your phone lines so we can keep the distractions down. You have a up on your top, you'll see a note box which is how you can connect to Adobe if you have connection issues. You've heard that the webinar is being recorded so it will be archived and available later. And we do have a chat box that you see about Midway Down. Thank you, there's an attendee chat. That's where we'd like for you to ask your questions. We do have a time at the end for questions and answers. We may not get to all of them during our presentation, but we will be archiving the questions, having our presenters answer them, and we will follow up and share those afterwards. So again, please mute your phone lines. No, because I don't want to get that heat, yeah. Some of you will probably have a few questions about where you can find information from the PowerPoint and the webinar recording, and so we do have the websites here where you can get it afterwards. And if you're interested in learning more about simulated work place, also link that as well. And these will also be included in the follow-up material so you have them. Before we do get started, we wanted to take a quick poll to find out where our webinar participants are from. So if you wouldn't mind, if you would, please look at the poll that's on the screen, which of the following best describes you. And just quickly let us know it represents you. And again, please mute your phone lines. Okay, great. So just by quickly looking, we have 23% of the audience from the State Education Agency staff, and 17% are other, and we also have State Education Agency leaders. Thank you. That just helps us know a little bit more about who is in the audience. So as I said earlier, my name is Kimberly Hambrick, and I'm the ARC Associate Director. The ARC is the Appalaster Regional Center, and we are one of 16 regional centers. Our mission is to design initiatives in partnership with our four states, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. And those initiatives will improve educational outcomes for students, close the achievement gaps, and enhance instructional quality. One of the key areas that we focus on is implementing college and career-ready standards and aligned high-quality assessments for all students. And that really is the key area that we're focusing the webinar on today. Today marks the launch of our webinar series on CTE and partnership with National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium. And at this time, I'd like to introduce my co-partner, Andrea Zimmerman, who is a State Policy Association Consortium. Thanks, Kimberly. And here at NAVS with CTECH, we are happy to be joining with ARC for this webinar series. It gives us an opportunity to really take a look at some high-quality examples of CTE in the state. So a little bit about NAVS with CTECH and who we are, but we represent the state-level leaders who oversee the CTE programs and policies impacting secondary, post-secondary education in the workforce. And that includes folks like Kathy Vantoni, the West Virginia State CTE Director, who will be presenting today. And it's really thanks to Kathy that we've been watching the simulated workplaces grow and evolve over the last few years. And in fact, in 2014, we awarded one of our inaugural Excellence in Action Awards to the Carpentry Program at Tulsa High School in Fort Gay, West Virginia, which is a simulated workplace site. And now these awards are designed to lift up high-quality, high-impact programs of study. And our panel of judges, when looking at the application, really saw how the simulated workplace at Tulsa exemplified exactly that. And in particular, through its integrated academic and technical courses and innovative work-based learning method. And so it's with that that I'd like to hand it off to Kathy to introduce the rest of today's presenters. Yes, good afternoon, Andrea. We're tickled to death to be here. The presenters with me today are Jan Hanlon, who is a secondary curriculum director in one of our county school systems. Doug Sands, who is a CTE instructor in the United Technical Center. Gary Clay, who is a business leader who is with the West Virginia Manufacturing Association and has played a huge role in the development of simulated workplace. And Austin Coffee, he is a student that has been in the simulated workplace for a year now, and we're tickled to death to have him so he can share his experiences. Simulated workplace was created because of the situation that was happening across West Virginia. Five to ten years, I have listened to business and industry at meetings, at conferences, and the message went from, you know, these are the skill sets we need for quality employees, and oh, by the way, you know, they need to show up for work. Well, that changed dramatically up until last year that employers were almost shouting at us that just send me somebody that's drug-free, can show up, do a full day's work, we'll train them. And that was the message, and I'm thinking, you know, what's going on? We have SkillsUSA winners. We have outstanding students, CTE students that are graduating. What's happening here? So one of the things that we figured out was the change is students understanding the business processes. We deliver great technical skill sets. But were we delivering the business processes that students can be successful when they take those skill sets into the workplace? So we decided to take some bold steps and move this forward. So we engaged business, and we also did higher ed folks, and we brought them in to talk about what if we changed the entire environment of our CTE classroom and had it actually working as a company would work. Now, it's not products that they make to sell outside the school building. This is actually operating and students understanding business processes and the fact that their attendance, the work that they do, and the tests that they take actually impact a business's bottom line because it impacts their company's bottom line. And so with the business folks, we identified 12 protocols that were absolutely mandatory in every one of the simulated workplace companies. We did that for a number of reasons. One, to make sure the structure was consistent across the state and everybody was on the same level as we started to implement these simulated workplace protocols. So our goals were that we didn't want to change everything. We're changing the whole culture of career tech and education. So we had to have time to get it implemented, and we knew that we couldn't just start statewide. So we set aside four years for our implementation process, and we began with pilots, and then we moved every year. We started out with 80 sites. We are now up to 501 sites. By 2016, that's the way we will do business in West Virginia. So when we first started, we had to get buy-in from our key stakeholders, and these were our business people. These were instructors. These were our students. These were everybody that was involved in the simulated workplace to make it happen, and we started with our pilots. So the whole purpose was to increase student leadership and engagement. CTE probably has more student engagement than any other classroom in education. However, it still wasn't to the level that we were looking for. We wanted our instructors to transition from actual teacher-type driven instruction to facilitators of learning and allow students to manage and take over these companies as the teacher facilitated that and monitored their progress. So it was a school-wide cultural change, and you will hear later from one of the instructors to see what the differences were. This is probably the most important slide, because people, when they hear a simulated workplace, our instructors, they get the room perspective of what they think this is. It's not a curriculum. It's an environment. It changes the way that we deliver career technical education. So it is not a curriculum. I can't stress that enough, because when we were starting with instructors, we kept getting this question, well, I really like this, but when am I going to have time to teach it? So the whole idea is that this is an environment of which they enter. It's an opportunity for students to be accountable for their own learning, because what they do in that classroom is directly impacts their company that they're in, their bottom line, or their value. And their companies are evaluated based on attendance, based on test scores, based on drug testing. The whole nine yards all go together to give this company a monetary value of which we'll get into later. It's an opportunity for teachers and instructors to be flexible and to be very engaging as they are in the actual workplace. They get an opportunity to facilitate learning that these students would see in an actual workplace. And it also requires high academics and high technical learning, because that's where the better students are, the more their company is valued. Okay, so we started engaging our stakeholders from the start. We had to establish a climate for change. People had to know what was going on. We started with the Manufacturing Association. That's why Gary Clay, who's on the line, was such an integral part of this. So we started with that group. Most of all, we wanted feedback from our pilots, from our instructors, and most of all, our students. We wanted to know, do they like this? Is it more engaging? Do they feel it's worth doing? And it's very interesting, because you will see later, our students are probably our biggest supporters of simulated workplace. So let's get to, like I said, this is in now in state policy in West Virginia. It's how we're going to be doing business. It will be mandatory in 2016. Kathy, this is Kimberly. I'm sorry, I advanced it too fast. We wanted to have Gary talk. I apologize for that. Okay. I apologize. Okay, so we're going to go over to Gary. Okay, Gary. All right, I've got a question. Okay. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about the engagement process that Kathy was talking about. It was several years ago that the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, which I represent, engaged Dr. Dantoni to talk about what we needed from potential employees. And the easier part of that was sitting down talking about... We created a great manufacturing pathway program with all the technical skills we were looking for, put that all together. But we also asked her for some soft skills. These are things that the students were missing. And those included a passion for safety, good attendance records and showing up on time. If you don't show up for school, what makes me believe that you're going to show up for work? Being drug and alcohol-free, an attitude that this was not just a job but a career, a teamwork mentality. We find many students today who prefer to work by themselves, but that's not the real world in our environment. We were also looking for a knowledge of improvement methodologies, process improvement methodologies, and a desire to understand how their efforts made a difference in the company and helped to improve and ensure their future. And these skills were important to all career and technical students no matter where they're going to work. It wasn't just manufacturing, this applies to all the students in technical education. And the simulated workplaces addressing all these areas, and the students are truly engaged. So that's my part. Jan, do you want to talk about the CTE School Administrator engagement? Yes, I do, Kathy. Thank you. As a CTE Administrator, what I needed to do to make sure that this change happened is I needed to inform, like the CTE instructors, of what simulated workplace was about. And I needed them to have I in and want to participate in simulated workplace. The next thing that I needed to do was to inform our local school board members and our county superintendent of simulated workplace. And I needed them to embrace the idea of drug testing CTE students with imperatives. I also needed to reach out to our business leaders because I wanted them to be excited about the change that was about to happen. As Gary said, concentrating on those professional attitudes for children or for students. And I knew that if business and industry were to embrace this concept that our students would be successful. Okay. All right. So, like I said, this is in our policy now. This is how we're going to be doing business. And we established between business folks and ourselves, the 12 protocols that we would follow for simulated workplaces across the state of West Virginia. So I'm going to let our folks talk about these protocols a little bit. The reason that, first of all, the reason we need the protocols I said earlier is so that we can standardize and make sure everybody's on the same page. So, Jan, if you would like to talk about the first one, changing the traditional classroom into a company. Okay. Every simulated workplace instructor's classroom should look different. Each classroom should mimic that of each profession. The environment or the classroom should be courteous, self-safe, clean. It should be a place where expectations are clear and teamwork and leadership is definitely encouraged. Students are in charge of the learning and the instructor becomes the facilitator. Student-led projects are one of the main focuses of simulated workplace. We should provide a meeting or a conference area for students to meet and to set goals and to make certain that our students are on task. Also, in the protocols, it gives attention to attendance. Like Gary said, we wanted to have a method for students' attendance to be tracked. In our facility at Ralph R. Willis, we use a commcloth. And students, whenever they come to class, they punch their commcloth, or they lay their finger down to check in the class to track their attendance. And then the next protocol deals with drug testing. And, you know, we just basically wanted to provide a safe work environment, and we knew that if teens remain drug-free in those adolescent years, that data shows that they're more likely to remain drug-free during their professional career. And we wanted to deter students from drug use at all. We encourage students with a positive drug test to get counseling to overcome their substance abuse. Our local agency and county is responsible for developing the policy, how the drug test starts to be administered, and what services would be available if a student did have a positive drug test. In our county, if we do have a student with a positive drug test, we remove the student until a licensed therapist or counselor can do a risk assessment and determine whether they are a recreational user or if there is indeed a substance abuse problem. And then once that's determined, the student will then take another drug test to enter back into the simulated workplace environment. I do want to say at no time do we suspend the student for a positive drug test because we want that learning to continue. And then critical four on your slide deals with the application and the interview process. And I have to say that this is what really created that buy-in for our instructors for us to go school-wide with the simulated workplace environment. And our instructors, when they hire a workforce, they go to our free-flight school and they interview students based on that application. And then they, and it makes, it gives the students a way to make informed decisions about their future career goals. When a student is asked to fill out the application and to apply for a position in the company, it takes a commitment and a really, and thought to go through the process rather than just be inducted into a CTE program. We do not deny any student's entry into a public-funded CTE program unless that program is full and we take 20 students in each area. We use rubrics to interview the student and to judge or evaluate their application. On the application itself, at Ralph R. Willis, we added an attendance component and a behavior component. So after they're admitted into their company, therefore we rarely have any attendance issues or behavior problems, and I would like to say that our quality of our students has increased at our center. And this is Kimberly. We have a participant asking who pays for the drug testing. We do. The state does. And is that through special specific funds or a part of your, it was set up that way? It's set up. That's part of the state dollars that go out. We send out grants to the local counties. When I said this is the way we do business, we have revamped all of our vocational dollars to support the simulated workplace initiative. So we fill in where they have, where counties cannot afford. We help with special grants. Thank you. And thank you, Jan. Doug, if you'd like to talk about protocol 10. Sure. Thank you. One of the areas that we needed to deal with when we talked to business and Gary and different places like that was we had to really put a heavy emphasis and focus on safety and sustainability and repeatability were huge. And we were able to move into this 5S initiative, which has become an industry standard just about any shop or workspace that you walk into today. This is a language that they're using on a regular basis. So when our students go out, they're already speaking an industry language. They already understand what it is to make that work environment safe, but not only make it safe, but keep it safe and what it takes to sustain that. So this protocol was applied in every workspace, which has given us again that repeatability and sustainability. This is Gary. I'm going to talk about the protocols 11 and 12. And really, those are the business inspections and the portfolios. This is where the local businesses get involved in the program. And the business inspections were coming in and basically auditing the programs. And this activity is so important to go forward here. And I think on many levels, and it applies to everyone. For the instructors and the schools, this outside validation that they're teaching the right things, it's an opportunity for folks to come in and change or tweak things that aren't working or aren't correct for today's environment. And for the students, it's a chance to interact with maybe some future employers. A nice time to show their skills and promote themselves. And for the employers, probably most importantly, it's a chance you get in to go in and see how well these programs are working. You find out what great students there are. You actually go in and meet the students and see the passion that these kids have for their programs. It's also a chance to correct some of the things and make sure these programs are going to provide the skill sets and the soft skills that you're looking for. And now for the employer, you feel connected to the program, invested in a program because you've put your seal of approval on it. So a very important process, we believe. And the second thing, and we're really excited about the portfolio program that's going on here, many employers tell us they can't trust the high school diploma anymore. It doesn't mean that these students have 12th grade skills. Well, the portfolio shows what the student has accomplished. It includes their attendance records and whether they're on time for classes. It's a documented drug test. It's certifications of the skill accomplishments they've had, whether that be welding or any of those programs, those certificates are in there. And there's examples of the projects and things that they've worked on. It's much like an artist's portfolio. Here are the things I can do and here's examples of what I've accomplished. When I talk to hiring managers and tell them what these portfolios are and what things are in there, what manager wouldn't want to see an employee show up with a portfolio of all his skills and abilities in one place. They actually are extremely excited and this is a real positive thing from the program. So I'm going to pass it off to Austin now to talk about the student perspective. Hey, I'm Austin. I'm a student at Wyoming County Career and Tech Center. I go to Industrial Equipment Maintenance Program. I'll be a senior next year. What I would like to discuss is our program. We go by as a company because that's what you would see out in the real world. Our company name is Mountaineer Industrial Services and we organized our program into four groups. We have a safety team group, equipment tools and facility manager, inventory control and supply manager, and informational tech group. Each group has a specific task that they have to do. The safety team, which I'm a part of, I'm the leader of it. We have weekly safety meetings on different subjects every week. And each employee, which is the student, signs a paper to verify that they attended the meetings. They understand, you know, the accidents and stuff like that. And we keep records of the safety meetings and that's the safety. The thing we're trying, the safety team is developing is a hazard training form for visitors. It's a brief summary of hazards in our shop that we're familiar with, but they are not. Because we're more familiar with our shop than they are. One main safety that visitors have to do is wear safety glasses. That's mandatory in our shop. You do not step one foot in our shop unless you have safety glasses. Because if somebody is running any type of equipment, anything can fling in your eye or hurt you or whatever. But the safety team is going to come up with penalties, consequences. Like if you do not follow safety regulations, they're going to come up with different consequences. But in the beginning, when we first started the simulator workplace, I was a little bit sketchy of it. I didn't think it was going to go well and I thought it was going to be a waste of time actually. But once we started getting into it and started rolling with it, you know, it gets a little bit aggravating at times. But you got to make little tweaks. I mean, you got to make it to where it fits you and your program. But once we started to get it rolling, it works really, really good. I mean, we've done it for a year now. It makes this more organized. It helps people stay safe, keeps different stuff clean, like the shop clean from anything like tripping hazards or anything like that. And also, I've learned being a part of the safety team that it could be a lifetime career. Like all the groups that we have, the four groups that we have, all the other companies in a real-life situation has similar groups. So each group that you're a part of, you can probably make a lifetime career out of it. Like each semester of the school year, we switch groups. We'll be in safety group one semester or one nine weeks, and then we'll switch to the informational technology manager. That I feel for each group. But once you get rolling with this thing, it smoothens out. It gets a little bit aggravated at times, but in a line out. The best thing about simulated workplace is the program gives you a little bit of a leeway. Like instead of them telling you, you got to do it like this, you can't change nothing, they're giving you a leeway to where you can make it to where it fits you. If you don't like something or like something don't feel right, you can make little tweaks to it. Like our company, we took it upon ourselves to change the names of our groups for it to fit our company and our business life. Austin, this is Kimberly. Thank you so much for giving the perspective of the students. Kathy, there is a question. You know, we have some questions coming in and I'm trying to keep some of them until the end, but there was one that's a little bit relevant here. And the participant is asking how often the classroom businesses are reincarnated so all students get the experience and bias. That's the way we do business. What are you asking? I mean, from now on, every CTE program someone enters, they're entering a business. They're not entering a CTE program. They're entering a company. Is that what you're asking? Yes, Kathy, I think that's exactly where they were getting at. Yes, we are no longer a welding program. We are no longer an industrial maintenance program. Students apply and are interviewed to come into a welding company at their school. And in some instances we have seniors setting on these seniors that are in the company setting on the interview process. What Austin was referring to, the students have a huge say in how their company operates. They develop policy and procedure manuals. They determine their name. They set forth the various organizational structure and they basically run their company and the structure becomes a facilitator. That is a huge cultural change. It is what we're seeing, and I'll get into that in a minute, is unbelievable. I'm getting ready to go into it, which is the data piece of it, I guess. What we're seeing so far is that we do student surveys. We do instructor surveys. We're only, you have to understand, we're only in our second year. We haven't even scratched the surface of our vision of what the simulated workplace will look like in another six years. But so far we have seen attendance rates go up, discipline referrals have gone down. We have a 96% approval rate from student surveys that we're getting. Our business inspection, so we're talking about these business people go into these companies and inspect, sort of like a health department inspects a restaurant. They have given me feedback. From this feedback we have changed some curriculum. We have added pieces of equipment. The companies have given us equipment when they wanted a certain piece for that particular program. We have had students been hired because of these inspections because business people saw what they were doing when they came in. So those business inspections, the business people absolutely endorse this program. So that's basically, we're very early on in our data. We're hoping to see we're going to start comparing our achievement rates, our test scores as we move forward. But at this point, most of our data is anecdotal. But that anecdotal data includes student focus groups. And I've asked the question to students across the West Virginia in at least five different settings. And I said, why do you like simulated workplaces? And without Biden and Eyelash, every single one of them in different situations looked at me and said, because we're respected. It absolutely floored me. These students have pushed the envelope of their companies and they're doing things in their companies that instructors have told me that they never even thought of that these kids have moved forward with. So what I'm seeing and what we're hearing and what's being activated in these classrooms, I would never go back to the traditional classrooms. So the lessons learned that we have done is, first of all, change doesn't happen really easily. It doesn't happen quickly. That's why we started with the pilots. We have tweaked this based on our pilot a little bit when we tried to put it in. You have to be careful. When you try to put simulated workplace in, my suggestion would be that you pick protocols, you sort of look at what do I want the first year to happen? What does it look like? They shouldn't have to look at the whole big picture because it will frustrate teachers and it will frustrate students. You have to support these teachers because they're going to be moving from a traditional instructional model to becoming a facilitator. That's not easy to do. Probably that's the biggest challenge of this whole piece. And you have to allow students to rise to the challenge. You know, the one thing I've learned about simulated workplace is evidently we put our finger on kids, our thumbs and kept them down. You let the finger up and let these kids believe I am amazed at what they are accomplishing in this last year that we saw. And then you have to have, of course, the partners with the employers because they will affect the change. This isn't for education. This is for business and industry. And it's a much deeper relationship of workplace than we ever had through just meeting or just doing business meetings. So where are we now in West Virginia? Next year will be our third year in. What our vision is, what I said was we just scratched the surface. Our big, big vision is that all of our career tech centers will become corporations. And every company within that will be part of the corporation. And the CEOs or the job formants or whatever the head student position is would meet with the CTE directors to talk about how do we improve our companies? What are the issues? If they come to a meeting and they look down, they see that the attendance issue in the welding company is far below the other companies. The students, along with the director of the center, will discuss strategies to improve attendance. They have a voice in their education. And the other is that this next year we're going to be sending out quarterly, I'm sorry, semi-annual reports to these companies to show students what their company has earned based on qualities of their attendance, their drug testing, their skill sets they've earned, their test scores, that their companies start getting a monetary value. But we have had so many wonderful ideas come out of this simulated workplace from students. Some students wanted paychecks. So I have some companies that give paychecks to their students. They have a payroll department in their company, and their paycheck is based on how many skill sets they've learned. Of course, it's virtual dollars. It's not true monetary dollars. But they can spend these dollars, you know, on other things that these schools have come up with. It's just been an unbelievable two years. And what we're seeing changing with students and the enthusiasm and also the instructors, even my instructors who have given me a push back on this situation are starting to turn. And some of my biggest naysayers are now my biggest proponents. So that's basically what simulated workplace is. And it's changing the culture, changing the environment so that students actually are experiencing learning about business processes in their career technical education classroom. Hey, thank you, Kathy. This is Kimberly. Before we get into the questions, our Q&A session, I just wanted to see if the other presenters on the line wanted to share a quick lesson learned from their perspective. Yes, Kimberly. This is Stan. I'd like to say something. Dr. D'Antoni says that this is, you know, it's not easy. But as a secondary education director, I want to say that this is the easiest initiative that I had to roll out, you know, and I rolled out in almost my 30 years. I rolled out Common Core, No Child Left Behind, and those were difficult. But this was relatively easy. And the reason why this was easy is I think we're doing right by kids through simulated workplace. We're empowering them for leadership roles. For instance, students rotate through a variety of jobs. Some are foremen, some are safety directors, some are quality assurance people. And so there's relevance for them to simulate a workplace. Another reason why it was so easy is because we went slow that first year to implement, to implement a simulated workplace. You know, when we provide the professional development for our instructors, we did not want to overwhelm the instructor. The instructors had the capability to customize each company and to make it effective. Our students at our center can tell what value they are to their company daily, weekly, quarterly, and by the end of the year. And all that becomes part of their portfolio process. So when students become empowered, it's really a win-win situation for students and industry officials. I know. Some days I go without. Great. Thank you, Jan. Gary Doug, do you have any questions learned? Sure. This is Doug. I'll just go real quick. Probably the biggest thing from an instructor's standpoint is making that transition from a traditional teacher to a facilitator. As an instructor, we have to learn to give up control and that's one of the most difficult things to do. You know, we have the book with the answers in it and to turn that over to the students and allow them to run with it is a difficult transition. So part of the work that we're doing now is going back in and offering professional development to begin to teach instructors how to become facilitators. To allow these students to go through and work their way through the processes themselves without having to have all the answers. So that's probably the biggest change for me as an instructor was changing that classroom to where I became the facilitator of it instead of talking together. Great. Thank you. Jan, those of you not speaking, please mute your phone. We're getting a little bit of background noise. Thank you. This is Gary and I'd like to talk from the business perspective. The big thing that we've learned here now too is how important this partnership between employers and schools is going to be going forward. The changes in business are changing. Things aren't changing every year. They're changing every three months. And for the simulated workplace to work, these changes are going to have to take place on a regular basis where students are going to have the right skill sets coming out here. The only thing that can happen is very close partnerships. You know, employers say that their most important asset are their employees. And if you were having problems with the raw materials, you'd button correct the position. That's what we're looking to happen here. And important is going to be the local programs. It's great for Dr. D'Antoni and I to be joined at the HIPP at the state level. And that's got these programs going. But the key success is going to come with those local partnerships with your local employers at your local school to find out what the requirements are. Because a lot of these kids are going to want to stay in their area for their jobs. Thanks. Great. Thank you, Gary. And Andrea, do you want to lead us through our questions and answer sessions? Absolutely. So we've got about 13 minutes to try and cover all of your great questions that we're getting. And actually, Gary and Kathy, this first question is to you and we're going to segue from your talk about getting businesses involved. And so if you could talk concretely about how did you get, you know, the businesses involved? You know, was there an MOU, et cetera? How did that function at work? Well, to begin with, I visited or contacted all the association, state associations, manufacturing business, coal mining association, oil and gas association. I made the Chamber of Commerce. So then I ended up after the first, first of all, we tried it that way. It was difficult. We had some business like Gary, for example, who was immediately willing to help. But we had a lot of small businesses in West Virginia that are one or two people and they had a difficult time giving up their time. So we, I finally contracted with a person outside of, and they went out and they worked with business and industry for a while. They still didn't have all the people we needed. So the next thing we did was we partnered with the workforce investment boards that are across the state of West Virginia. They helped us find employers that would go in and become business inspections. That was a huge help. This coming year, the National Guard that has all the expertise in these various areas and are also worked for folks have agreed to part with it. So that's basically how it all started. Gary, you want to add anything to that? Sure. I can talk specifically about the Manufacturers Association that Kathy knows. Like I said, we started first at the state level, sitting down talking with Kathy and talking about the programs. But now we've gone and it's really of the emphasis is on our association to get our members involved. Kathy and I have both promised if I have a school that's not working with our members, I'll call her. And if she has companies that aren't working with the school, she's going to call me and we're going to stress and get those folks in there. I think the big thing to do is there's a little bit of a sell that has to go on maybe with some of the smaller local employers, but it is critical for them. They're all telling us they can't find employees. If you can't find employees, you've got to be going to the school, to the source. These are the lifeblood in the future of your company or these employees and they need to be involved to be able to do these things. So it's not a matter of them doing you a favor, it's something that's important to their business for them to be there. So that's the approach we've taken. And Kathy and Gary, specifically for the extremely rural areas of West Virginia, did you have to do anything special there or were folks lining up ready to help out? No. Well, West Virginia is extremely rural. I think the whole space is extremely rural. But in our very, very rural areas, that's where we have engaged the national parks. That's where we're looking at the various workforce investment boards to help us in those particular areas. That's how we're trying to do it. Great. So now a question to you, Kathy. We did get a question about, did you look to other states for models or initiatives? And second to that, were there major infrastructure changes that you needed to do to implement this? No. We sort of did this based on conversations that we had with business and industry and just through all those conversations figured out or thought we figured out what the problem was, why employers couldn't find the employees. And what they were telling us, it was the soft skills. It wasn't a technical skill. So we changed the infrastructure. Not really. We reorganized the way we delivered. We changed the environment. But simulator work doesn't require a major dollars and it requires a change in attitude and a change in environment. And sometimes change in the culture and by working and acting and promoting as companies, it changes the dynamic and students really get into it. They have uniforms. That's part of it. They clock in and clock out. They have reports that are due. The instructor, they do it right. It's less work on the instructor because the students are responsible for all the workings of this company. It's amazing to watch. So this is where we're going to play away a little bit into some Perkins questions because we've got a lot of our state folks on the line. And so as you said, you reorganized some of your state funding to be able to better accommodate the simulated workplaces. Did you also do that with your Perkins money? Well, Perkins money, we have to send out per FTE. So I really don't have that much. We don't get that much Perkins compared to other states. West Virginia is a very small state. Those dollars pretty much go by what the rules are with Perkins. Where we tried to help is with our state funding, our vocational funding. We reorganized that. So the Perkins pretty much stays with its priorities the way it is. And so now, as you know with Perkins, there's different indicators about like technical skills assessments, et cetera. We've got a question here about do you use industry recognized certifications in the portfolio to demonstrate that TSA and how? We do industry recognized certifications. We are setting money aside of our state dollars next year to pay for industry recognized cert for students who cannot pay. All of our programs have a, if it is there, they are required to have an industry recognized certification with that program. And we pay for that student's ability to get that certification. So the answer to that technical assessments, we have portfolios and capstone. That's all part of the company's requirements. So a student to demonstrate their technical skill attainment, every completer has a portfolio that they present to business and industry, and a capstone that they have done to culminate what they have completed in their program. And that's all presented to business and industry. Okay. And this just to make sure that I don't know if you answered this part of the question, but there was a second question about does the state determine the certifications that are valued by business and industry? You know, what's that process? No, business and industry. We have asked, we have had focus groups. We reach out to the various employers to see which certifications that they think are important for us here. We also do NCCER, which is a certifications that go across state lines. So we look at certifications that industry, business and industry are telling us that they want. Okay. And this is Gary. I would also say that part of the audit process that takes place where the businesses come in, if things are changing and new certificates are coming out, we should start to hear some of those out of there. Or again, Kathy and I at the state level would be identifying some of those things that are changing. So again, business needs to be involved so those certificates evolve with the workplace. All right. One last question that we got here was about the role of post-secondary education in the simulated workplace, you know, dual concurrent enrollment, et cetera. We have what we call an EDGE program where students going through our programs have opportunities during free college credit with a program that's aligned with them at the post-secondary level. That is in our state law and students, that's also with their consortium. So yes, post-secondary is a piece of this through our career pathways. Right. Well, with that, I think we're kind of running out of time. So if there's any additional questions, please throw them into that chat box and we will certainly make sure to follow up and answer any other questions you do have. So with that, Kimberly, I'll hand it back to you. Great. Thank you. And again, I want to thank everyone for attending the webinar. Special thanks to our presenters and Kathy and the great team that she pulled together with the work happening in West Virginia. As we said in the beginning, and you know, we have it on the screen as well, and you will get a follow-up email that will show where the PowerPoint in the webinar and the recording are archived. There's two different sites. We'll also make sure to include information for where you can learn more about the simulated workplace. We also said early on that this was the first in a series of CTE webinars that we will be putting together. So we will definitely put you on the list for the other three as they come up in the near future. And we'd like to ask you to help us improve our work by completing the short evaluation survey that's going to up up on the screen in a minute. So please thank you for doing that. And again, as Andrea said, if you have any other questions, make sure you get them in the chat feature and we will answer those. So if nothing else, thank you again for your time. Thank you again to the presenters. And we look forward to having a conversation with you again soon.