 Welcome to Love Where You Live, your monthly magazine of the best of Sheboygan County from the Sheboygan County Chamber. I'm Jane Brill, filling in for Betsy Alice. Today we're welcoming Scott Keane, Technical Talent Acquisition Coordinator with Bemis Manufacturing, and Paul Griffin, Learning Coordinator Coach with Johnsonville. Welcome to both of you. Both of you are very involved, not only in recruiting for your companies, but also in many educational programs throughout Sheboygan County. So today we're going to be discussing a project that's been in the works for a while, Red Raider Manufacturing. But I think before we begin, why don't you each tell us a little bit about your roles with your respective companies, because I think that's a really nice segue into our program today. So Paul, why don't we start with you. Yeah, I'm with Johnsonville Sausage, and right now my role is Learning Coordinator Coach, which really my role is to oversee the technical training for all of our operations sites. And so that includes the current sites in Johnsonville up in Sheboygan County here, and then a couple satellite sites. So really, I look at my role with Johnsonville as helping to develop the technical skills and abilities to help us be more efficient, safer, and have higher quality product. The other end of it is including work with developing potential members that could potentially work for Johnsonville by getting involved with the school districts and getting involved with different partnerships within the area to develop programming that really enables kids to get involved earlier on to understand what their opportunities are on technical careers. Okay, great. Scott, how about you? As you mentioned, my title is Technical Talent Acquisition Coordinator, and although that's a mouthful, that Talent Acquisition Coordinator allows me to go to middle schools, high schools, technical colleges, obviously job fairs. We also go to Lucas Conference Military Recruiting. So my primary purpose in that position is not only to make sure that we've got our technically skilled positions filled at all times, but also to go out and cultivate new and young men and women into the workforce. And I've been with Bemis for 36 years, and in manufacturing for the bulk of that time, both in thermoset and our thermoplastics divisions. And I really utilize a lot of that experience in trying to acquire and gain that initiative with trying to get young guys and gals to join our force. Both of you have been very active with the Red Raider Manufacturing Project, and that's going to be the open houses on October 18th at Sheboygan South. So we are very anxiously awaiting that. For our viewers that aren't necessarily familiar with what Red Raider Manufacturing is, can you give us a little bit of information as far as the project and how it began? Yeah, so about three years ago, as part of the Chamber of Commerce, we have a business and education partnership committee that really tries to link up businesses with the education side of it. So we get in and we start talking about what's currently some of our issues are and start brainstorming about ideas about how to get through them. And during one of these meetings, Mr. Mike Trimburger, Principal at Sheboygan South, we're kind of going back and forth a little bit about whether or not we were giving them the right kind of information for them to provide the skills that we were looking for, and we were kind of asking them why they weren't giving us the students with the skills directly out of the workforce. Because a lot of times we're seeing at the entry level, there's turnover and there's just the lack of soft skills and the lack of being able to perform any kind of technical job. So we got to talking that eventually built into more conversations. There had been other conversations going on at the time around the county because manufacturing is huge in Sheboygan County. And if that fails, a lot of the rest of our economy is going to fail. So we started talking about their medical curriculum and how they got there with that. Because this is a very specific curriculum targeted at developing medical professionals. And so basically after discussing how they did that, we came to the conclusion that we need to do a day come, which is a develop a curriculum for a similar program for technical education. And that's kind of where it all started. Since then it's really picked up a ton of steam. A lot of businesses have jumped on board. We've really put a lot on the TechEd instructors to say, here, what do you guys need to do to give us the students that we need through your high schools? And since then it's just, they've told us. They've told us here's, we asked them, what's your pie in the sky? And they basically said, well here it is. And it ended up being about a $4.3 million project, which we did receive all the funding for through local, mainly local, contributions. There was a core team really from industry that was working very closely together. That's Rob Kraus from Ball Rath and Jeff Klosterman from Kohler Company. And between the four of us, with Mike Trimberger and a number of other Sheboygan South and North individuals, colleagues, we started jelling together and putting this plan in place. And we met on a very, very regular basis and came up with some pretty cool ideas on what exactly do we need for the next generation to make sure that we keep manufacturing as strong as it is in not only Sheboygan County, but in the state of Wisconsin. Yeah, one of the things that we kind of kept running into was how did it get this far? We have such a huge reliance on manufacturing our economy, but how did we get to this point where students coming out, they're graduating high school and they don't have the ability to turn a wrench or use a hammer. They're holding it upside down. There's a lot of things that we've seen over the years that are telling us there's something wrong and walking through their tech edwings, we saw those problems. So if there isn't focus on this and if the push is always to send kids to four-year college and that's what high school is for, unfortunately, you're going to miss out on a lot of great opportunities for these kids that are really good with their hands or they have some of that interest in technical capabilities. So our machines, our equipment, our tools were very unaligned with their curriculums and that's where a lot of this stems from. And it is because students were getting pushed to the four-year schools. They were, instead of being told, yeah, there's great opportunities locally within the county that you won't come out of school with debt from. You can use educational reimbursement. They're being pushed to degrees that are really costly that really don't have a lot of jobs on the back end. There's a huge momentum for developing the STEM or STEAM skills within Sheborgan County. And you mentioned the core team that really worked on the Red Raider project. Can you tell me a little bit about the manufacturers that donated or contributed to this project, who gave of their time, their resources? I mean, Sheborgan County has an amazing history of collaboration between our manufacturers and our educators. So can you share a little bit of that with us? Well, as I mentioned earlier, there was that core team. But I believe the last meeting we had, we've got over 20 different individuals from all walks of education as well as industry that attend those meetings. Because right now, we're in the throes obviously of unveiling Red Raider manufacturing. But the one thing, the key piece that we continue to talk about is, we want to make sure that, you know, we not only kick this program off the right way, but in the spirit of continuous improvement, we need to continue to meet and redevelop and redesign and reshape to make sure that the students are getting what they need on a day to day basis. And also making sure that from a technology standpoint, we're bringing in the latest greatest because we do not want to get back into the 60 year old lathe or the 70 year old press of whatever sort that might be to make sure that we continue to give our students the latest and greatest. Yeah, our industries are all, I would say, the local companies. And that ranges from, you know, we've got Johnsonville, Bemis, Valrath, Kohler are the top core four here that we keep referencing to. But you've got Rockline, Sargento, American Orthodontics has been very vital to helping to develop what has happened within the curriculum. And so we have to be innovative to be competitive within our industries. And so having the latest greatest equipment and technology, it is vital, it's critical to our success. I want to thank one other company in the area, the Randy Romanowski's car dealership has played a major role. I mean, Randy knows a lot of people. And there was some tremendous discussion going on in, you know, who else wants to be part of refrigerator manufacturing? And he did a tremendous job in getting out and spreading the word and, you know, and asking, would you like to participate? Would you like to donate and invest in this program for the school system? That's great. So the students who are participating in the Red Raider project, what are some of the goals that you hope to achieve by having them involved with the project? Some of the measurements that you're looking as far as this really very vital role into our workforce development to make sure that we have students with skills that are going into our manufacturers? Well, I think Paul touched on it earlier. You know, there have been students that come in, don't really know how to use a drill, how to hold a drill, might not use the proper way and ergonomically in, you know, using a hammer or a drill press or what have you. And I think, you know, those are some of the skill sets that we can teach easily at the high school level. But I think the one thing that envelops us is an umbrella over all the different things that students are going to learn, not only using hand tools and using equipment, programming robots and all that other good stuff, is using all of that equipment in a safe way. Because I think one of the things that I've experienced at Bemis, when I see someone that just comes off the street and now their employee at Bemis, I think you end up taking it for granted that they know how to hold a drill. And in a lot of cases what I've seen some of the young guys and gals that have joined Bemis as a casual employee, for example, they really need to be showing how to safely and ergonomically hold a drill so they don't hurt themselves. And at the end of the day, it's really about that practical application, right? It's about learning. And I think a lot of our students were realizing over time that a lot of our students maybe don't do so well just being test takers and trying to remember or memorize things. They need that practical application so that they have this positive experience that can maybe drive them to the right career. And this is important because if we look at right now in our economy, I think we're at about three and a half percent unemployment. Great, great for the city, right? That's something that's really amazing. But as far as industry goes, when you have a lot of general or entry-level openings, unfortunately the amount of people that are available in your workforce is really extremely diminished. So that included with the upcoming retirements that Scott mentioned before, the attrition rates, new technology, continuing to build on to your companies, those are all going to play into this. And if you only have 1,500 people to choose from in the county, and most of them may or may not be able to physically work or mentally work. Right, some may not be employable. Right. You know, that's kind of the level that we're at right now with our numbers. And you know, it is. It's very scary when you look at the figures for a workforce, as far as, you know, what I think they're saying, three people exit the workforce daily to the one person coming in. So what are some of the benchmarks that you have with Red Raider Manufacturing? How are you going to measure the success of this project? Well, one big one is that we're looking at how many students, one, get into the curriculum. So how many students can we grow this to? There was a, I think it went for, I can't remember the specific number for the medical curriculum, but it increased, I want to say by 200% was that. Yeah, I think that number sounds correct. I think that was kind of where we were looking at pushing this to. And I think it would be easier because not everybody may be interested in medical. There might be more interested in technical. The other piece that we're looking at measuring success from is how many students go into Red Raider Manufacturing and end up going into a program at LTC. So we're looking at those kind of statistics and data to understand, okay, well, do we have the right people in the pipeline? How many are there? How many are completing degrees? Are we seeing any of those? Because we can do some of that data collection upon hiring new members. And that's again why I think it's extremely important the follow-up needs to be there. All the industries that have invested in Red Raider Manufacturing, we need to continue to go to the schools, go to the job fairs, go to the freshman orientations, continue to talk about manufacturing. You know that manufacturing, you can make an awfully good living and you can have a lot of fun while you're working, especially from a technical type capacity with any of the manufacturers in the area. I think another thing that we want to try to look at is, so, Inspirations County is kind of this link between schools and businesses to kind of give kids an insight on what kind of jobs are maybe available to them and what kind of work-based learning opportunities are available. I know when we first looked at that data about two years ago, we looked at the top 10 jobs that students were looking into and I think eight of the top 10 or seven of the top 10 all required doctorates. That's not really feasible and the other two or three were like professional athletes and a model and you know I mean that's really that top 10 stands for maybe less than 1% of the entire world. So that's something that we don't want to, we want to show people and kids, especially in parents that they have other options when maybe this doesn't work out. Well, and just touching upon the Inspirer discussion, you've got Inspirer which leads to job shadows with companies, co-op opportunities, which we've started a couple semesters ago, internships as well as youth apprenticeships. But the other thing also that some of the schools now are actually adding as an hour class is Project Grill. So there's a ton of opportunity for students not only from the eighth grade, but freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior that have all these opportunities to avail themselves to take a look and really get a glimpse into manufacturing and what might be the best place for them. Yeah, so on October 18th, Sheboygan South, the unveiling of Red Raider Manufacturing and you can recognize or you know can be thankful for the fruits of all your labors and everything that you put into this project. Can you give us a little bit about what's going to happen on that day? There's going to be a lot of tours going on. So students, parents, educators, the business leaders, anybody can really come in and go through and look at this. It's supposed to be a shiny new object that people see and draws them in and I think that we're going to have a lot of success in doing that. We'd like to see more people get there. We have some special guests. I think the governor is going to be here to kind of kick it off with some of his staff. Great. But it's not just October 18. Actually, October 22nd is also on a Saturday at North High School and that is going to be open to the public from 9 to 11 30. So if you don't have a really cool Save the Date card yet with our Red Raider logo, you need to get one. Get one in the hands of everyone. Well, I'll just take that one. Okay, well there you go. So this is great. What about just real quick, the location of the Red Raider project? Can you tell us a little bit because I think that's really cool how that setup is. Yeah, I mean, it's right in front of the building. We let them design it. We let the teachers work with their contractors to design where they wanted to put this and they wanted it right in front, which was really, I think, important to us that they were committed to that because it shows us that manufacturing is important and there are a lot of opportunities in Sheboygan County. And there's going to be some terrific signage as parents, students, visitors come into each facility, whether it's north or south, to see what's available and what's going on inside the school. Great. Well, thank you both so much for joining us today and your efforts in helping develop our future workforce and the strong manufacturing legacy that we have here in Sheboygan County. We're going to take a quick break. And when we return, we'll have Luke Goral from Sheboygan Falls School District joining us. So, stay tuned. Our next guest today is Luke Goral, the principal for Sheboygan Falls High School. Thank you for joining us today, Luke. We were just listening to Scott and Paul talk a bit about Red Raider manufacturing and that unveiling in October. But Sheboygan Falls High School has a great project that is also being unveiled in October. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Absolutely, we do. On October 13th, we have our ID Center, Innovation and Design Center, which will be unveiled to our public. And we're excited to unveil this really neat space that is really going to give our students a flexible learning space for all our programs that are going on. The space has been in development for about five years and it has a lot to do with our STEM, our science, technology, engineering and math programs. And then we have a lot of extracurricular programs that are also utilized that space, our robotics. So, we're just really excited to have a inviting space that our students are excited to use and that are just going to enhance our programs to the next level. Super, and Scott stayed on the set with us because he's involved in you're going to be incorporating a new injection molding machine to the Innovative Design Center as well. So, why don't you talk a little bit about that because it's very unique, not just to Sheboygan County, but actually the United States, correct? Sure, can I go first? Absolutely. The plastic injection molding machine is really the cornerstone of the ID Center. And when we first started working with Bemis several years ago, we wanted to develop a space to really develop those 21st century skills in our students. And equipment is definitely a huge aspect of that, like Paul stated earlier. Our students have to have that equipment to get the experience on so they can go into the great manufacturers in our area and step in and at that entry level and be able to do the job. You talk about the machine being unique as far as we know it is the first plastic injection molding machine in a high school in the country. So, we're extremely excited about that. And Scott can explain more about the actual machine and its components. Well, it's a 33 ton electric injection molding machine from Cincinnati, Millicron. And as Luke had mentioned, it is the first injection molding press that's gone to a high school in the country. There's a number of different things, a number of different reasons why we actually went this route. From that injection molding cell, you've got a machine, you've got a dryer, you've got a GammaFlex unit that keeps the mold hot. So, the different positions that someone could end up getting after they've gone through probably multiple courses regarding the machine processing, tool maintenance, electrician, machinist, dye maintenance, maintenance personnel in general, you've got a whole number of different positions that can be derived from this one injection molding cell. And I think that was one of the important aspects as we talked about this a few years ago in bringing this as a concept and now finally into reality where the students are going to be able to get involved and see a lot of different aspects within one small cell that's in the ID center. And that's huge, you know, to get peak their interest early because the positions that you just mentioned are definitely positions that a lot of our manufacturers in the county are in desperate need of. So that's, you know, that's some great skill development that's going to be happening there. So what about, what are some of the other pieces of equipment that you have within the Innovation Design Center? Well, along with the plastic injection molding machine, we have the CNC, we have the lathe, we just purchased the new plasma cutter. So overall we have a lot of the updated equipment that our companies are using with the control panels that they are using that can be interchangeable with that equipment. So our students, when they walk into a job or when they look to go into engineering or whatever that may be, the equipment and the process behind, you know, the CAD and developing a product, they're going to have that background knowledge where it's not going to be new. They can step in and say, yes, I have an entry level of this, I can use that machine, I feel comfortable and I enjoyed it. So the equipment that we have is going to give our students the ability, like Mr. Hughes, one of our tech ed teachers, says, he says, what this room gives us the ability to do is to go from art to part, give the students the 360 view of, you know, every position that is evolved in developing engineering in manufacturing and whatever that may be. So our students can take that design, they can build it right on site where sometimes with all the laser cutter, we would, you know, have to have a couple days lapse where we're going to have to have a company in the area, cut that piece for a robotics program or whatever that may be. So the experience that our students can have in that room, whether it's math, science, technology, engineering, it's going to be excellent. Great. So now Bemis was a huge partner in the development of this innovation design center. Were there some other companies that you worked with as well? Actually too many to mention, but we did receive PC equipment from LTC. We have received several grants for the equipment, the plastic injection molding machine, of course, from Bemis. We received racking from Kurt Joa. More importantly, I think, than the equipment, though, is the people, is the individuals that have helped us develop the center. And through all our programs that we have, we have individuals from Volrath, Bemis, Kohler, many small businesses that donated materials to a lot of our programs. And our students working with the equipment is definitely a huge part, but our students working with employers and people, engineers, you know, people that work in those companies, I think is just as beneficial. Bemis has sent numerous individuals into our classrooms, K-12. We have an externship program where teachers go to Bemis and many other companies within Sheboygan County so they can then adapt their curriculum and talk about all the great jobs, whether it's entry level, or I guess you could say four-year degree positions that are out there. So every student has a different path when they leave high school. And through the relationships and the equipment, we're hopefully following through with our mission to really give those students the best path they have to their future. Right. And you incorporate some fun into that. You have a lot of different special programs within Sheboygan Falls High School, as do other schools within Sheboygan County, but tell us a little bit about Project Girl. I was a judge for Project Girl this year, and I loved Sheboygan Falls' girl. And just the passion that the kids had in developing that. Can you just talk a little bit about those programs? Sure. The year of the Jeep always, I always forget what year of the Jeep, but our students took an antique Jeep and they developed this unbelievable grill. They refurbished the Jeep. They put a grill under the hood. It had a ventilation system. And the marketing, the design of that grill was a total team effort, not only with our TechEd teachers and, you know, Mr. Tennyson and our students, but the parents that got involved, our art teacher got involved. Bemis employees and Scott and their engagement in the activity is, you know, it's an activity that truly gives our students a true taste of what they can do and what they can accomplish. And they were so proud of what they did and, you know, how they presented their grill. It's just an amazing program that we have, but it also, of course, is throughout the county. Right, it was. I have to say, I was incredibly impressed. It was the first time I ever went to Project Girl and just seeing the grills of these, you know, that these students came up with and designed. And then, you know, it's great for working with the other companies because then you start some mentoring and, you know, they really can get a good idea of some of their technical career paths. So that is wonderful. Students really took it to the next level. You know, Project Grill is, the end result is a grill, but the journey from the beginning and the design phase and trying to come up with what exactly should this look like. You start to knock heads a little bit with the manufacturer, whoever the sponsor is going to be. But the bottom line is, you know, they created their own tiny mini infrastructure. They elected a leader. They had someone that took care of finance, inventory, engineering, and they really went out throughout the city. And they actually had a terrific marketing approach where they were going to, Ace Hardware, for example, you know, got some paint, got a $100 gift certificate, got all these different things that really a well-run organization is able to do. And these students within a 30-week time frame did a terrific job. Yeah, it's a terrific learning experience. So thank you, Luke, for joining us today and Scott, again. Thank you for highlighting, you know, some of these great programs that we have within Sheboygan County and really how we are a leader within the nation of developing our workforce. And some of the initiatives that are happening here are very unique. So as we continue to work together, I really appreciate everything you're doing for our community and leading our workforce. So thanks for watching us today. And please tune in for the next episode of Love Where You Live.