 With this, I'm going to mute myself and turn it over to Jen and Eric from Ridgwood High School, and I'm going to say this thing as I do. There was an individual that many of us have gotten to know from a north central Illinois School District who last winter at the dual credit think tank referred to Ridgwood as the shangry law of all things PWR act and they, it was such a great comment. I mean, I remember when I first started really understanding what was going on at Ridgwood about five years ago and then increasingly through some experiences I got to have four years ago and two years ago, and every step of the way it was like whoa they're doing that and they're doing that and they're doing it so well. So, Jen and Eric are are two of the most humble leaders that I've ever met in education. So, one of the great things I think about their success is that they're, they're always going to be the first to say well here's what we could still do better here's what we're trying to improve on now. And let's be clear because we do have people from around the state in this group Ridgwood has has also some great advantages in terms of their geographic location the size of their school, but that's not to say it's easy it's incredibly hard. The goal here isn't to catch up to Ridgwood or beat Ridgwood. It's just to learn from Ridgwood and to celebrate their success and then to help each school and each district across the state move forward on whatever their pathway is in these directions and so when we put something out there like this, it's not to say you have to do it the Ridgwood way and the Ridgwood timeframe and you're behind. The goal is to say, here's a here's a blueprint that that probably has some helpful things to learn so congratulations and thank you to them, turning it over to them now and please don't be shy about asking questions. Thanks. Thanks, Jason. I don't even know how to follow up with that there's a lot of pressure on this presentation. But I'm going to let Eric start. So, unmute yourself and take off Eric. Thank you to in the chat just a little reflection before we get started. And, you know, we sort of talk about this amongst our staff sometimes like, you know, as a freshman, what did you want to be when you grew up. And once again you may not have the answer, you may not know but then, you know what did your school do to help you figure that out and what your interests were, and what experiences did your school provide you to help explore corruption. So you don't have to go ahead and you don't have to answer all three but just reflect on that in the chat we'd appreciate it. It's got interior designer we've got a lawyer of that. No clue. Teacher. Broadway, wow nice architect, counting marine biologist. No such thing as career pathway to support it. We have that. Don't we Eric. Yes, there actually is. There are so many examples that we didn't weren't sharing today. They had to realize if they wanted that pathway chances where they would have to move. They wouldn't be able to stay in the West but yes, they did quickly. So we'll touch a little bit on this later but we always feel like, you know, this is one of the things that we ask ourselves and we want to make sure that we are doing something about with our freshmen so. Let's get up from here. Jason alluded a little bit about Ridgewood and I think he talked about the positive side of being in our area. I'm going to kind of talk about both sides of it. So we are located in Norwich. And for those of you don't know where Norwich is, it's just outside of O'Hare airport. They actually call us the island in the city, because we are completely surrounded by the city of Chicago. We are with a piece that the city of Chicago did not annex when they went all the way out to O'Hare airport. We are extremely small. So if you want to go the next slide, we are a two and a half mile radius district. That's it. And in our two and a half mile radius district so we don't have buses so when you're talking about making sure kids get to school on time they're all walking or riding a bike or getting dropped off. I think what's even more interesting about that two and a half mile radius, we have three elementary districts. Two districts feed completely into our building. One district has about usually no more than 10 sometimes as low as one student who feeds into our district and the rest go to Main Township. So prior to our school being built in 1960, most of the kids went to Main Township or Taft. So it used to be that we were predominantly Eastern European and Italian, and that has since changed. We are one building high school district of 835 kids. We have over 50 languages spoken. So if you are walking down the halls you could hear a variety of them. We are 30% low income, 10% special ed, 8% EL, which is very low compared to what we used to be. And I started here. And I put in there just to give you a sense that we're 65% white, 25% Hispanic and 7% Asian, which I think is surprising to most when they start to see those numbers if you are familiar with the area compared to like 20 years ago when I started. So when we talk about pathways, we kind of want to put in perspective what's required in order to get that endorsement, right? So you kind of have to see the big picture and then how does, how do you make it work in your own district? So there are four key pieces here. Individualized learning plan, you know, Jason alluded to the fact that we are competency based school. So our students do have individualized learning plans, and that has been a journey in and of itself. We could talk a long time about that process about where we started to where we are. But the short version is having that plan really helps students make some decisions that they might not have otherwise been able to make. At the same time, having the right setup to have those conversations. So we use an advisory period. And actually that has been probably one of the biggest silver linings of the pandemic is our use of that of that time period and building relationships. And that is a whole story about how each teacher's kids were hand selected based upon interviews with every staff member to figure out the best kid to fit in that setting. You also need to have some type of career exploration. And most people have used Naviance, Zelo, whatever you use, you have to have some way to demonstrate that kids have the opportunity to explore careers. One of the things that we've been fortunate to do because, you know, we have those two elementary districts, and we don't always have control over what experiences they have. Eric found a way to use some of our EFE money. So those are your employment for education money to provide all of our eighth graders with access to Zelo, so we can start them on that career journey a little sooner. And we actually went in and train their teachers on how to use it and they have a time period where kids can actually access it. And it was pretty cool. We had a presentation last night with our board, one of our students talked about his experience of not necessarily just the career exploration but having our teachers go over. He's really into gaming and our computer science teacher went and chatted with all the students and he couldn't be more excited to share his coding experiences and how that was the program best fit for him. The piece I think is the hardest piece. Eric might be able to elaborate more on this about the labor market and this really came from our EFE director and Catherine. She did a bulk of the work behind this. So I'm going to let Eric tap into this piece a little. It's important that when we set up these pathways that we want to make sure that if students do complete these pathways, there are going to be jobs available for them and that their jobs pay well. We don't want to set our kids up and send them in a pathway where they come out making minimum wage $12 an hour because you cannot support a family necessarily on that. And we also want to make sure that the job growth is there. So really those are the two components is they're going to be able to get a job and they're going to make a good living and have a good career with that pathway. I think what was has been interesting with the career exploration and an example of the labor market we are kids do a lot of activities in their English class as well as their business class on career exploration. And if you walk around when they're having these conversations and they're really digging into what they think they want to do, they'll start to say, oh, I'm only going to make $30,000. I can't do that. Or, oh, they're only 12 jobs available that doesn't work for me. So they really start to have a good dialogue about understanding what their choices mean for the type of life that they want to have. And then the last piece for the pathway endorsements is that you have to be able to work with some type of post secondary program, typically that is your community college and for us that's Triton we're very blessed. There have been very accommodating and in many ways as progressive as we need them to be in order to support our efforts. But not all of ours are aligned to Triton our education pathway we work with Northeastern University so figuring out what works best for your pathway is is really important. And you need to have courses that are dual credit. So we'll talk a little bit about some of the work we've done to help in that area but again Triton extremely helpful. You have to have related activities. You have to be able to offer the transitional math and English which we piloted and had both in our building and that has been a huge game changer. And then necessarily just for our kids who are struggling I give the example, you know we had an AP student who actually wanted to take the transitional English we couldn't figure out why and then she articulated. It's because they did a lot more writing in the transitional English class than they did in some of our English classes. So that was good insight for us to understand we need to bring embed more writing experiences for our kids so using their input is really helpful and guiding the direction you go. And then the last one are professional learning experiences so they have to be able to explore those careers, do some team based challenges, which don't always have to be in the classroom setting, and then have some career development opportunities so kind of seeing the big picture. It seems like a lot, but you really want to just start picking through what do you currently have in place that fits into this. So setting up your pathways, you know, it takes time as you enter these into the system and part of getting these credentials if you do have to lay them out. So you do want to look at your courses, lay them out organize them, see where they fit into your pathways. You know so we had to go through that process. We had to put in who your partners are when you talk about partners they want to know who your partners are for four universities community colleges, technical schools, your work based learning partners unions so there's a lot of different things that you got to sort of organize put together when you're setting these up in the system. And that system is sort of you fill it out and then you get approved to offer these career endorsements. You know, they also want to know what are the credentials certificates or degrees that these will lead to and what partners are you working with for that because once again done do any good. All right, take these dual credit courses we're going to get you an endorsement in this pathway but there's nothing that goes with that there's no certification, no degrees. So that's something you must lay out as you're setting these up as well and organize everything. But you know you have to have the two dual credit courses you want to put those in the system what are those going to be. You can also put other courses that you offer that are not do a credit that you want students to take that are going through these pathways. They will ask you what are the gatekeepers to these pathways in terms of your English and especially of your math so what are the math courses in the end that kids are going to need to take. This is the time you put your transitional math courses, and that could be different with maybe transitional stem transitional content later stats or transitional tech based on the path that students are going down. So the time it does it does take time to enter all this to get it all set up, you want to give yourself a summer to do that we're fortunate enough to have one of our summer workers that that one of our former students comes in summer works, and they spent quite a bit of time doing the data entry part of this and entering all the pieces that you really need to get these pathways set up so you can get the credentials to Illinois State Board of Ed. So I want to talk a little bit about like the difference in a small school in a large school because I believe on this call we have a variety of different district sizes. There's a mindset that in some cases it's easier to do this in a small school or it's easier to do it in a large school. So I'm going to kind of talk a little bit about the difference right. We're, as you can tell a very small school, our administrative team is very small. So it from a building level there's a principal and assistant principal. And those are the true administrators as a dean and athletic director but they don't particularly engage in this part yet there, their job will change a little next year. But then there are five division heads. So the plus side of being small is we have this flexibility to kind of think differently about how we use the people we have to their strengths. And so we keep redesigning as we move through this journey we know that it's going to continue to change like the title division head will no longer be division head because it doesn't serve us. But needless to say Katie who's on this call. She is new in this position this year she is our director student she oversees student services and career pathways. And Eric, as the assistant principal he was the division head of stem last year. He did the bulk of this work as a stem division head. Next to our other division head of curriculum instruction. I don't have district level people right district office is myself and an assistant superintendent. So, we're able to still do all of this work that's required with a very small team. And I think the same is true for a very large school right where you have layers of people that you can tap into to say, director of curriculum, I need you to work on this. Right so I wanted you to understand like even though we're small we've been creative with our resource use and you know that's a whole side conversation that we can talk about how to look at using people differently in your roles and we talk about kind of that strength space where people's strengths and let's let them lead in those areas. And this is really helped in this lens. So, yes it's sometimes easier in a small school, I guess not a lot of red tape, right like everyone in the building comes straight to the superintendent's office because I'm in the building and say hey we need this. And we all work together and so I think that is helpful. But when you have a large staff, you can do that. And I think we're going to have a lot of stress or asked about enrollment we're going to get to that about how it works, but I wanted you to understand like, how do you put this together depending on your school size I think it's doable for anyone. You just have to find the people who are best suited for those roles. So for us, when you think about the seven career pathway endorsement areas it becomes a little bit cumbersome right like how do you take a small school and figure out all these pathways. So what we ended up doing is we split the pathways into two chunks and you can do this however you want right for us. What worked for us as arts and science, because we could easily put our courses and experiences into that. And to business and tech, but I'm going to walk you backwards on how we got to that point. So as you all know, I'm assuming you know the state and that you know there are 16 career clusters. So if you look at the next slide. So if you look at the bottom of this slide. You see the all the career clusters, ag food nutrition education training hospitality tourism. So those are your normal 16. If you work up one level you can see how the seven Illinois career pathways fit those 16 career clusters, please tell we see them into those seven pathways right. Again, we're small how do you take and build seven pathways, we had to then break it down into what we viewed as two separate pathways. And so we can then staff it a little differently from an arts and science lens and a business and tech. And so that's just to show you our heart how our brains thought to be able to do this for a small district, where some of you in large districts you may be able to label them all seven career pathways. We label them to for the sense of not overwhelming our staff, right and not overwhelming students, but we know when we talk arts and science we're really talking about those four career pathways that align with the state. Business and tech it relies on those three. So for us this is how we had to break it down. You could do it however you want. But this was easy for our staff to understand. And then we could help them see where they fit into it. And that this year we actually rolled out our why went through the whole PWR act again and then let them decide which of these pathways, did they feel more comfortable in, because it's kind of our future work so giving teacher choice as well you know we give our students choice, we give teachers choice, and we'll talk a little bit about how that plays out in some of our future direction. You know sometimes people think just electives and like oh so the elective would fall under one of these two pathways, but really our goal is that we want our core curriculum to relate it to these pathways as well. Like currently we offer to integrated science we have integrated science to we offer two different options, really one for their going into arts and science path one that's going to business tech path and the same thing with our math courses. Our sophomore and junior level we actually offered different pathways for the math and how it relates because we want the whole curriculum to revolve around these pathways not just electives. So, our freshman year. So, some of you are like, Well, how do we enroll our students into these programs or pathways. Our freshman year is our explorer year, and we do a lot of different things we do use our advisory we do this out of the matchmaking personality style. We also have our freshman project is that students will take everything they find, and they actually will be presenting about the research they did on what is, you know what pathway or what corruptions they have, and based on all the surveys that they take they look at it. They look at the requirements for education the job outlook, the salary job description, typical work week. They look at all those things, and then they sort of choose a path and choose some careers, and then they present on that. And that's where they sort of make sure they know. So once again, what is the typical work week look like for that is that the work week you want to have where are these jobs okay that are you willing to move relocate for those. You know if you have those jobs where the salaries what are the costs of you know so can you live on those values so those are all the things that they look at. And we also have a visit to try and so that way they can sort of see, and sometimes people like ball they all going to train know but train has a lot of programs and most four universities are going to have programs similar to that. So much from here we want them to know all the different options all the different things they can major in within an area because some people think there's a doctor and then there's a nurse, and there's no other medical fields they don't know that until we take this trip to try and and then they see all the different options they can have. And that's sort of another thing we look at is we want our kids to be like if you want to work in a medical field let's go down this pathway let's not say I'm going to be a doctor and day one. So we're going to go into the medical field and now you have many different options, which can change over over the next three years, but we want our kids to go in a direction. I think it's important, like one of the big changes work. We've got a lot of moving parts here, because we're still trying to transition to 100% competency. We see three years ago now, or two years ago redesigned our entire freshman year experience. And so we wanted to fill in the gaps of what's it like to learn at a high school level. What do they need to understand about competency. What do they need to know about careers, what do they need about study skills so we looked at the whole big picture, and then had to redesign that whole freshman experience so we took a team of teachers. We let them figure out we gave some deliverables. Then what does this look like in practice. And so we're on your shoe of implementation I think I'm looking at Eric's I think so. So because we know we start different with freshmen by the time they get to senior year that senior year needs to look different than our current senior year. So we now got this four year rollout pandemic has helped amplify and move that forward in some ways. But our freshmen don't have your typical experience that I think most of you have where they end up having to eventually select what they're doing at specific time slots right, kind of releasing that student ownership over time. So we built in chunks of time that are not equivalent to maybe what the sophomore junior senior student is experiencing so that they are having these opportunities. So I think this I just see the question about they still having the visit with with COVID so they did Eric you want to talk about how we did the triton visits this year. It was virtual. So we actually did virtual visit visits they actually all if you look at all those all the queer clusters they actually had representatives from each one of them and train actually offered that for all the schools feeding into them so we have quite a few high schools that were in Triton. So they set them up and they set up every two week period every day from 230 to 315. They had a different virtual exploration for the different programs. In the past what we do is we had our students normally pick one thing they want to explore deeper and they would go over there and maybe get to see the facility and get the presentation. It's a little bit nicer because now we instead we asked our kids to pick at least two different things to explore and some of our kids actually explored more. So our kids had the opportunity to really look and they can go if they wanted to go both weeks, they can go both weeks and see all the programs that train offered in different pathways. We took advantage of that because of those two weeks, we also they did Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday. We did Friday we threw Ridgewood sort of own customized one for education pathway and our manufacturing pack pathway so that way we can get our students doing a little more exploration on those as well. And we had really good turnout and we were able to sort of fill our pipeline of students that are going to be coming through our pathways to get our endorsements from those two weeks. So it, you know, train set up that way and actually worked out really well for us, we'd rather go in person but but this really was a good a good thing. So, I think the other piece that you know is you're going to we're going to emphasize as it goes through here is you have to change the narrative for people about the difference between the mindset of being a college bound student versus a career student. So we all know every student ends up with a career. So their path there is different and so we start to help. We had to help our entire staff understand every we're not like this career school but we are because everyone gets a career right. So when we look at their routes differently and it goes back to that individualized plan and so this helps with that narrative as well because we all know that not everyone's going to need to go to a four year or two years so I think as you see some of our examples you'll get to the sense of what that could look like. So one of the questions do they do in our own time or specific time actually at from 233 15 is actually one of our intervention time sort of range intervention period that we use for students with the office hours. So it's was I mean you can sort of say yes it's school time but same time some of those students if they did not have to be an intervention, it sort of wouldn't be their own time. We sort of told we told our students that they had to complete two of those. So, unless again some complete a lot more than two. So, I guess you could it sort of was school time but also a little bit of their own time for those virtual visits. You always wonder like what are some examples of the pathway or how do students complete the pathway what do they do, and it starts off with your faculty you got to have faculty that are passionate about that pathway that are willing to do some recruiting willing to work, willing to sell that program, because they see the value and they want to make sure that that people are successful and we were fortunate to have a couple of teachers that really felt Katie Dave is one of them on this call that this education pathway we need to start growing our own teachers. And this is such a shortage of teachers we need to do something about it and they did and they set up a pathway. And their pathway was partnered with Northeastern Illinois University, and through that our juniors and seniors senior year they have classes that actually go to Northeastern to take you can sort of see this on this chart. And then they have another class that they take senior year at Northeastern as well. And then we also offer some in house courses at Ridgewell we offer surveying education and intro to methodology. Part of one of the when you look at the Illinois requirements for the pathway they really want that methodology course. That's a hard course for our students go take as a dual credit because most methodology courses are specific to the content you're going to math methodology or English methodology it's hard to have just a methodology high school to students can take. So we worked over the summer and actually collaborated with a couple other high schools to create this methodology course so our students could take that as part of the pathway in education. Some other things that were nice about this is not only their students get to go take class that Northeastern. They did a lot of observations and once again our teachers that ran this program. They wanted them to observe every component of education not just the teaching part they want to make sure that they're observing the social workers counselors technology administration. And so they had to do some some observation hours for each of those, along with observing with our partner schools are elementary schools. And then there's actually another high school that they were able to actually went to visit the main township high schools get some observation hours there. The great thing about this is not only were students able to get those 60 work based learning hours for the pathway. Northeastern actually gave them credit for those hours as well. So if they continue at Northeastern you always have those requirements for how many observation hours that you need. They would already be credited with some of those observation hours as they went from what they did in high school. So that's one of our pathways we had five students that actually earned that career endorsement on their diploma last year. And we were fortunate enough that we got all our work based learning hours before COVID occurred last year with with those students over those two years. We do have a couple other pathways that we got endorsements for we have our manufacturing pathway. I'm going to let Jen talk a little bit about that she's done a lot of work with my passion. So, I'm going to kind of give you a little background why this was so important for us. So Eric alluded last time you had to have faculty that were passionate about these pathways. You also have to look at the needs of your community and so in our backyard literally a series of manufacturers. And when I was the building principal. The superintendent at the time was helping push the STEM initiative and was meeting with all these manufacturers really in a, in a passive way we weren't getting neither of us were getting the results so when I stepped in as superintendent I spent my first year attending every manufacturing event I could because I needed to understand manufacturing today, not what it was from my mindset of growing up. And it was an amazing experience and I built some really great relationships so we resurrected our kind of our STEM advisory board but we looked at from the lens of what do you need and they kept saying we need employees. And they said okay what does that mean. And then the short version is we don't have the space, the resources, staff, whatever, to offer a manufacturing program in our building. So we said where do you send your people to be trained. And they said TMA. And they were like okay we need TMA in the conversation, can we send our kids there to be trained. And they said, Oh, okay let's talk about this so we ended up sending our kids to TMA, which is out in Schomburg so you know we got to boss our kids there which you think about you know what I said all our kids walk. So they create a very different day, they would leave for two days a week for chunk of four hours and still have to then be held accountable for what they missed out of their normal classes. They did that first semester. The first go around of this or first two go rounds, they received NIMS credentialing and mill and laid so they walked away with industry credentials, but the really cool piece was are one of our manufacturers agreed to do an internship the second semester. They all received paid internships at the local manufacturing behind us at QCC. John Gorman has been amazing help, and they were all given personal mentors that their staff met with our staff to say what type of kid is this I'm going to match them up with a mentor in the in my building. They got they left school to go get their paid internship. And then at the end of the year, they were all offered jobs at QCC. Now, to ended up going on to engineering so they left to go to college. And the rest have taken jobs there or I've taken a job at another manufacturing. So that nest wasn't necessarily teacher driven but what was important is getting our staff to understand manufacturing today. So we did some field trips right we can walk right over we took our staff and we took our counselors and we said, we're going to take you over to the manufacturer so they can talk to you about what manufacturing is today. And they also created some really amazing educational brochures, so we could educate kids. So we do have a very passionate counseling and social work staff who knew kids that this would fit so that's where that passion of the staff fit in, and they helped us figure out who would be best served. And if I could go back to the first year. Good old Bobby who would have dropped out of high school until this experience came in, and he rocked this experience. And I'll never forget, we had, I think it was miss all me in and a couple people from the state about math so we had Bobby who was a manufacturing student would have dropped out, sitting next to our good old. And Diana who is now at Harvard right talking about their math experience. And it was at that point Bobby realized he was doing the same math she was, and she was going to Harvard or MIT at that time. It was just really cool like for kids to see like, I found what I want to do, and I'm really good at it and I can use my skill sets to be successful. And so finding those right connections is huge. But for us we wanted people to be able to contribute to the community who wanted to stay in the community. And at that time, you know, that group of kids also had to defend their graduation. So one student in particular talked about this experience. And he at that at this presentation for his defense his parents were there because the kids get to invite anyone. And that's when he told them he had a full time job. Like he got his job offer and signed his contract. So the tears were coming it was just a really great experience because some parents know their kids and they're like I don't know what you're going to be doing and then to find their niche is helpful. And yet the manufacturing piece for us is really huge just because it, it only serves for some of you said you know how do you do all these with small numbers. You know we're lucky if we get six kids a year. So, if we get 10 we're super excited because of the cost to send them over you know it's huge and we pick up that cost. I will say the manufacturers. We've had our conversations about how they can help contribute financially because they know it's a huge cost on us. And so they've offered some scholarships to help pay for it so finding ways to do the financial side is also important. Because of a we have a computer science pathway this one we have not had any students earn the endorsement and yet but that is our goal. Our main issue is, and you'll see that in these pathways is sometimes it's hard to get those work based learning hours. And that's where we're sort of falling a little bit short on this. But we did in this pathway, we do have a partnership with with, you know with right college and right college actually takes our students. We did last year and we're hoping to have two students this year, but they actually have a program where these students get to go to right college, a couple days a week, and they work a couple days a week as well. And so they work 20 hours a week paid, and they get their school paid for and all their, you know, so really, they get they end up getting a nice degree with their computer science with zero debt, and then they actually get the experience to so it's like, and that's one thing we noticed in computer science is now they want the degrees they really like the experience so having this program has been great and once again we we're trying to get to where we can give the endorsement on their diploma but at least we have this pathway set up and the students do end up, you know, with, you know, have some great opportunities with that. So there's a question what is endorsements for computer science pathway. So, there's many different ones there's a lot of certifications that they can get when you look at these endorsements but mainly by talking about the endorsements that it's really it's it's the career pathway endorsement from Ellen State Board of Ed, and meeting all those requirements is sort of what we're talking about with that but once again we one of those requirements was that 60 work based learning hours so that's we're having trouble with that with this pathway but we do offer this pathway for our students. And one thing we did differently is starting two years ago. When a student wants to be in the computer science pathway, we say all right, first priority is we assign them their computer science classes, and then we make sure everything else fits into their schedule. Whereas in the past we decide them their classes and okay do you have room for a computer science class so we feel like we need to change the way we do business this is the top priority for them, and then we fill everything else in. We're not in district credential but our students are, we have some other things where we are setting up some testing with Cisco and stuff or because we'll be getting some credentials now. One of our main things is our computer science or our cyber security. We, we are starting to do the project lead the way cyber security so that really help with the students getting some credentials as well. One other pathway that we're really doing well on now too and we'll have some students that are going to finish with the career endorsement is our construction pathway. And this is another one where how do we get those 60 work based learning hours. And because of insurance reason stuff there are some things it's hard to get our kids out to the jobs, but what we found out is the main thing with those 60 work based learning hours is that we need our students to be working with the professionals. So we bring those professionals now to Ridgewood, where the students are now building a home so actually are doing real work, but then they it's not just in the real work but they have to do in the real work with professionals so we need to we bring in our union and we have a lot of people in our community that do our contractors work with unions. So now we can bring them in and they can work with them at our school, as they're actually building a home that is eventually sold and used by somebody. And we can get them those work based learning hours so that's another one where students we should have some we have five students in that pathway will see how many actually meet all the requirements, but we should be having some students with that endorsement at this year. And the beauty of this one is the goal is that students who are in kind of that marketing and entrepreneurial pathway would be able to market the sale of this and then work with the realtors on selling, so that you can kind of get the full market. It hasn't happened quite yet but that's one of our next steps so how do you, you know, if you hear us talk a lot you say we'd like to shift the narrative of that the core your typical core classes should become the the support to your elective right so we talk about that the career elective should be driving the learning and then using that to engage kids and bring in your math science English societies, it's kind of the supports, so that you start to see the connections because we get rid of the silos right when kids learn in silos you know let me spend 1550 minutes hearing a bell go to the next room, stop learning this they don't know how to make the connection. So we talk about no cells no bells, right, because they need to understand the work that they're doing and how it translates to something else, and in particular our construction was geometry and construction we had kids who've never been able to be a pilot math who totally embrace this, and it has helped. Even in the gender area we've got a lot of females who are now going the construction route so you start to look at your equity pieces, all the work we've done has really changed. So us close our achievement gap with our Hispanic population in all in all areas of testing and direction and future goals so that's been helpful. Sam made a great or Gina made a great point in house internship for the IT group with your tech department and we do have one student who does have a 60 work based learning hours, because of internship he did actually a couple summers ago unfortunately this summer we did not let any of our kids do the intern yeah with with these times we're not letting them do the internship with it but that in the past was a great opportunity so good point there, Gina. So we do want to get to some of the things that you know some some basically some next steps for us and what we from base to what we learned and some tips for you so. So we try to create quite a few here. I think one piece that's you have to kind of understand is our schedule is so flexible right when we see what a kid needs we create a schedule that matches it so I can give like two quick examples. Several years ago we had a student who entered who knew she wanted to go to MIT. The only way you can go to MIT is if you do real research. So we had to figure out which science teacher was willing to do real research and we had to connect with the college professor right and so she ended up doing her research. Long story short she went to MIT rock star got in you know but she wouldn't have been able to do that without that without that research. And then fast forward a few more years we had another student who thought she wanted to go to MIT but she had already taken before she got here like classes at Northwestern in the summer and really thought MIT was a route. And so she did not know what type of what area she wanted to study in so the same science teacher create a very different experience for her in the summer that allowed her kind of an exploratory to figure out what aspect of science she was most interested in. And then we had a meeting with the student and her parents to say okay, your child needs a different route than what the traditional student has let's talk about what that looks like. And she stayed somewhat because she already taken AP calc as an eighth grader. And so how do you kind of really have to figure out what you're doing differently. And then she ended up. We had to create an entire different schedule for she did not go to MIT she went to Harvard instead that's where her sister went. So I say that because you can see that the whole spectrum and we talk about career options we're not talking about Some are going to go to an Ivy League and we get a lot of kids in Ivy Leagues which most people don't realize right we've got a couple at Harvard a couple at Princeton we got some at Yale. We've had a couple at MIT, but we also that's not our end goal right if that's not your end goal that's not our end goal. So when we talk about that flexible schedule, students help have say and how they create that day. So, for example, I got a kid right now who is passionate about automotive was a struggling learner before the pandemic, a struggling learner in the pandemic. We had to create an entire new experience for that student as well as 22 other ones. They have a whole different school within a school experience that they are charting what they want to learn and how they want to learn it like his presentation on using technology chemistry in the engine of a car blew me away like you learn chemistry in ways that most kids could never learn it. So we talk about being very flexible here. And as you can see they we want them to learn their core content and career so if we're talking long term. I guess the easiest way to visualize it is let's say you have the career path for we'll divide our staff into two arts and science and your business and tech, and then you're going to kind of see those two break up so you may have a chunk of 400 kids who are going to be potted into groups of 50 or 100. And then they're going to start to work on their career focus, and then their learning comes with it. Very different I think the most people think through, but they won't be running by bells. They have very specific competencies they need to accomplish. And in that time they would leave the building to go do interns or to work. We found in the pandemic a lot of our kids had to take a job in order to provide for the family. So that's something will continue. We want everyone to earn a credential and associates degree before they leave here. We've got a really good start all of our freshmen get nine dual credit hours freshman year. So that's in PE, computer science and project lead the way correct me if I'm wrong my missing one year. Those are the nine. So they all get nine hours or freshman year. So we also want them to be able to present well so they have to defend their graduation. So that's kind of our next steps. A couple of our tips. And it was sort of run out of time here, but some of our tips are first off pathways are for all students a lot of times people think all this is just for those students that aren't going to college but as Jen mentioned, even though students that want to go to those top schools, these pathways are going to allow them to get into some of these top schools. So every you know as she said every students going to end in a career so these pathways are for all students. And questions out there will do students have flexibility what if they choose a path. We ask all our freshmen after their project in English, pick a pathway. We want them to go down a pathway and we want them to realize they do not like this pathway and yes they can switch before they're you know $60,000 in college that because they tried that pathway after high school so we do want all our students to pick the pathway have experience. And the other thing that we know tips that we have is that we really want to train your counselors and get them into this, because they a lot of times they have a lot of direct contact with the students. I remember we were actually last year's P 20 conference a little kick for that I remember that one counselor said the success of a counselor is not how many students they send off to college, it's how many students finished whatever program they send them off to. And I thought that was great. I remember somebody from 214 that said it but I thought that was, that is really what I want to do is whatever we send our kids off to after high school, we want them to complete that and be successful and it really, you know, it's not what, you know, we're not looking at what path it's just are they going to be successful when they leave here in that pathway so I know we're out of time, but we, if you guys want to ask any questions we can stick around. I want to end with one piece I think I added on the slide but it didn't get on here because I Eric was already in the slide. I think the piece that you got to start with your why. And for us this is our why right we've done everything that our communities asked us and going back to our why like we work with our counselors, going back to our why we started this year like we did the whole career pathway. Presentation again with the staff kind of as a reminder right so your pathways every we have them embedded into our professional development like Monday's agenda as a whole career pathway piece. So, it's, it's what we do it's who we are it's what we expect of everyone. And that shift takes a little bit of time right because for those of you who are typically in a college bound college bound and people don't see a career at the after college, it becomes a little bit more challenging. But using our counselors in the whole pace process and let them guide that let them be the leaders helped them better understand. And so I see what we're talking about right, and I will give a huge shout out to Ann Catherine who is our DVR, our efe director. She's retiring this year and she'll be dearly missed but she helped us understand big picture and how what resources are available We have an annual workshop that we bring teams of people to and the PWR has been our piece all along, and bringing our counselors to help them truly understand those components was huge. Sorry, yeah, it's a lot of information in a short amount of time. So, first of all, I don't know about anybody else listening but I'm ready to go back to high school and with all due respect to my high school teachers and administrators I want to go back to high school at Ridgewood. I don't know who else is feeling that way after listening to this, but it's so exciting. And so thank you both, and congratulations to you. Yeah, Lindsay Sharp's getting religious on that point so thanks Lindsay. The, we, Eric has said they at least Eric I don't know about Jen I asked Eric, while Jen was talking has a few minutes to answer questions because we've still got some really awesome questions in the chat and we want to get those answered. So, I'm going to try and feed those to Eric thinking about what he said and if I miss one, just throw it in the chat or unmute so I'm going to start with johns question. Do you guys have every student choose a pathway and how do you schedule students who say they don't know what they want to do. Yeah, we do. That's part of their freshman project, their English project is after they do that and they present part of their presentation is picking one of those two pathways that we sort of talked about so it's not necessarily be as detailed, but we want them to start exploring more, and either the arts and science or business and tech so we do ask all our students to do that. And then we asked them to pick some electives in that area. sophomore year so all students do but they're not necessarily stuck in that. And some aren't come, you know some have conviction like hey this is it. And some are I think I'll go you know so. And those are like I think I go they need some more exploring sophomore year maybe even the junior year so cool. That's that's very helpful to me as a parent in this house right now to. Do you. How do you staff for this type of flexibility. There's so much that goes into that so I guess we can we've always looked at what do kids want to do and then we fill our teachers to fit that. So we don't hire more people. You know the board is pretty tight on fte's again it goes back to being creative and how you use your people and having a really good working relationship with your union is helpful. I will say we will be negotiating a new contract next year and we are going to change the language to really. I think be innovative on both sides of the lens of how does it help teachers be seen more as a professional and have some flexibility in their own schedule like oh like I would like to drop my kids off. Can I start can I shift my start time oh I'd like to pick my kids up I shift my end time right our kids get that same option right we give kids late starts early dismissals. They have office hours it's there's a whole piece to that. But someone asked about the counselor piece so several years ago we had three counselors and two social workers. And we saw a big shift in our SEL needs. And so we shifted to three social workers and two counselors. And we break our we use one of our social workers she works solely with freshmen and kind of helps do both sides. She has an amazing background. And then the two counselors split then pretty much sophomore junior senior. We put a request in we would like our third counselor back so I am pushing for the first time ever for another FTE because we based upon what we're doing a career pathways that we need another person to really support us. And it goes back to the staffing. If you could walk next door into my nice little glassboard, you know, for we have it kind of charted out how our needs are going to change over the next couple years. And how do we use our the strengths of some of our staff members to fill those needs as we move forward. So we really just kind of play with what we have. And we're really fortunate that we've got people who are like yeah I'd love to do that or no no no don't put me there, but I'll do this. I have a lot of choice to our staff as well. Cool. Are there on and off ramps for students if they decide a pathway isn't the right fit while they're at Ridgewood versus like Eric said, after they've accrued $60,000 worth of financial aid. Yes, like you said, yeah, that's definitely is and that's one of the points is we want them to get those experience. I know somebody in the chat talked about they want to be a veterinarian. And that's probably one of the biggest paths that we have students we have so many students want to be veterinarians and then they actually go get some work some experience and realize it's not cuddling and petting dogs it's it's sometimes it's not the nicest atmosphere and they realize that is not the path for me so that's part of the point of this is once again go down a path see if you like it. If not, let's go down another one and try to get it figured out before you leave so What platform do you use to house their web portfolio. So now there's actually extension on canvas that we're able to use, but we are switching that over to transio. You know so that is something will, you know so we'll be using transio probably next year. So we're still working on that setup right now. Canvas actually bought. I can't remember the portfolio so I think that we are able to use. And then just finishing up there were a couple questions that Eric and Jen have answered in the chat also about using Perkins funds for transio and that there are 55 teachers at Ridgewood. Yeah, so we have we have pretty small staff I would say like given what we are able to do. You know you asked about the counselors are counselors are social workers, they all have an advisory now, because it, it we needed them in order to fill to do what we need to do for advisory, but it's also helped them build some relationships and how inner workings outside of their office happen. And so they don't, they're not like sit in my office anymore type of people they kind of are let's get out and about and go meet kids where they are, because we used to hear for every like kids don't don't take their passes I said then go to them right like this is it may seem like we're too accommodating but let's start with meeting them where they are, and then working to do the release of it they are 14 year olds so kind of shifting that mindset of what seems like we're too accommodating to know that's where their needs are right now until we help them understand how to better advocate and self monitor and all those good pieces right. But small staff man, our staff works hard. I think Katie who's new Katie's on this call. Katie do you want to add anything based upon like your experience you just stepping into the division head roll this year. Oh she had to jump off I'm looking. She's on. I would say the teachers are all very accommodating with like always being student first so I think that has also helped with like the pathways and like the direction that we're going but being new to the role I know personally I'm learning so much and I'm loving this role and then just seeing the direction that we are taking the school so. I think the one piece I don't know like we talk about a lot of dual credit classes. You know we set up our contract many years ago to encourage people to get master's degrees in their content areas so that we'd have more dual credit teachers. So when we hire, we kind of look for that as one piece to when they want to do their movements they have to get approved through me and it's typically in a content area. I've got some in tech because we just need some other areas. But we've done. And then if they need coursework. Triton has been really accommodating to help us get more people. Dual credit approved. So we've done a much better job on looking at the needs for what we want to do which is why we have nine credit hours for freshmen for dual credit. That's all in our building. And so it's helpful. You've got to really think through how that plays out. Our contracts written like you max out in 10 years with your bachelor's because we don't want teachers with bachelors. We want teachers with their master's degree who can then provide more opportunities for our kids. Only because that's what required they're required like we're working when I said about changing the contract. Like my shop teacher doesn't need a master's degree like that doesn't help me so now we're working language. How does his work experience or his credentialing. How can we use that to move him on his salary schedule that is appropriate to his career field. So that what we're trying to do with our students we're also doing with our staff so you can start to see like. I always say don't expect more of your kids than what you expect of yourself. So if we're going to expect this of kids we need to be able to give the same opportunities to our staff. Awesome. Well, thank you again. What a great way to start a Friday morning and we really appreciate it and again, we hope that this opportunity for all three of you from Ridgewood and everybody else there can walk away from it with, you know, a feeling of pride and again to all everybody who who participated today thanks for participating. We will post this and follow up with the link so everybody has it if you want to show other people and please reach out certainly feel free to reach out to me so that we can support the work happening in your districts moving forward. So everybody is going to have to take their own path though there are a lot of awesome lessons here to help us kind of find markers in our own paths towards the future so thanks again everybody I'll stick around for a few minutes if anybody needs anything but hope you have a great Friday great weekend and stay warm. Thank you. Thanks.