 Thank you again to Mitch and Melissa for sharing the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship story and some of the early data with us here today. A key theme of their remarks was of course partnership and the many organizations that they work with across the region to make the program here work. For the rest of the day today, you will have an opportunity to hear from those partners. The first session that we'll get to in just a minute features voices from a number of the school districts that work closely and send their students through the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship program. Later today, we'll also have an opportunity to hear from some of the employer partners that work directly with many of the students who are moving through the program. And at the end of the day, just to make sure that you are all here and listening, you'll have a chance to hear from some of the students, both current and alumni of the program who will share some of their experiences with you. But immediately before us, we have a panel that is going to look at the perspectives from the school districts. And we have leadership from two of Charleston's Regional Youth Apprenticeship programs, partner districts here with us today, who are going to share their experiences, discuss how and why Youth Apprenticeship works for their students, and surface a few common challenges to participation, both for their districts and for the students they serve. Many of these may be familiar to you, those of you who work in schools and districts and states. But I will not dive into them now. I will introduce the panel and invite them on to stage with me here. First, we have Dr. Jerita Possilweight, who is the superintendent of Charleston County School District. She's been in that role since 2015, and she previously served as a chair of the State Board of Education and as a member of the National Governing Board of the American Association of School Administrators. As a chief K-12 officer for our foundation, Dr. Possilweight also helped establish a statewide business education partnership that fosters systemic educational change. So she brings to this panel a wealth of experience in building these partnerships. We will also be joined by Sonya Adderson-Steward, who is the Academy Coordinator, the Office of Career and Technical Education in Berkeley County School District. Sonya currently serves as the Career Academy Coordinator in Monks County, Monks Corner, South Carolina, and she's served in various roles throughout her career as a higher ed administrator, a CTE teacher and department chair, and a career specialist. She's also a National Board Certified Teacher. Chad Vale will also join us on the panel. He's the Work-Based Learning Partnerships Coordinator in Charleston County School District. He joined this role first as a volunteer, and he's now a full-fledged member of the CCSD Career and Technical Education Support Team. And prior to joining the school district, he worked owned, operated, and successfully sold several businesses in the region, including an ice cream store. Trish Wieg is also going to hear from her today. She's the director of school counseling at Cane Bay High School in Berkeley County. She began her career as a South Carolina counselor in 2001 and has spent the past 18 years working with students in both Charleston and Berkeley Counties. And finally, we have Mr. Dionne Jackson, who began his career at Lancaster High School as a teacher and assistant football coach before moving to Berkeley County School District. He's won a number of awards for his teaching and his leadership, including, he's a recipient of the 2014 Berkeley County School District Principal of the Year Award. He currently serves as the Berkeley County School District Senior Associate Superintendent of Operations and Administration. And moderating this panel is Matt Gandal. He is from Education Strategy Group, one of the national partners with PIA. And before founding and joining ESG, he has held roles at the U.S. Department of Education as a senior advisor to former Secretary Arne Duncan and was the Executive Vice President of Achieve, a national organization formed by governors and business leaders to help raise educational standards. So without further delay, I'll invite them to join me here on stage. Mike's working here. Terrific. Good morning, everyone. It's great to see such a huge crowd here to dig deeper into this topic of youth apprenticeships. I'm very excited to go digging with you to learn more about why and how these communities have really been able to scale up such an impressive program. That was a very impressive presentation, I have to say, for those of us who are working around the country. We all want to know the secret sauce, and I'm sure it's very complicated, but I'm going to do my best to try to draw out of this group some of those ingredients so that those of us in the room are really trying to figure out how to scale this and our communities and our states can really wrestle with it and figure out how to get there. So I'm pleased we have such a great group of leaders, those who are leading the whole school systems and those of you who are actually doing some very important roles, leading pieces of the work that, frankly, I think all of us want to learn from how you even build these roles. Let me start with the superintendent, if you don't mind, and ask you to speak for a minute about, we learned a little bit about how this program works, and I'm sure we're all eager to learn more, but can you step back and just help us understand why the Charleston School District made this a priority? Sure, you can step to the mic. It's probably easier for folks to see. Why was this such a priority, and how are you going to sustain it? Thank you. I'm going to speak for about five minutes. Each of us on the panel won't take that amount of time, but I'm just going to introduce sort of the whole gestalt of this. My husband recently told me a story about a young man who scored a ticket to the Super Bowl. When he arrived, he found that his seat was on the very last row of the top tier. He was looking around with his binoculars and spotted an empty seat on the 50-yard line, kept an eye on it, the seat remained empty. So he worked his way down, and there was an elderly gentleman seated by that empty seat. So he said to the gentleman, is this seat taken? The gentleman said, no, it isn't. He said, my wife and I, for years and years, have gone to Super Bowl games. She passed away recently, and the seat is empty. I would be pleased if you would sit here and join me. I would enjoy the company. And the young man said, but don't you want to reserve the seat for some of your best friends? And the gentleman said, no, they're all at the funeral. So that is a story about priorities. It's a story about priorities. And in K-12 education, we could not be working harder. We could not be working harder. But there are two big barriers to what we all say our mission is. Every school district in this country, all 15,000 of us, will say that our mission is to prepare children for college and careers, or career and college. What are the barriers that keep us from doing that? I want to share two of them that we confront here in our region. The first one is our painful history. Gadsden's Wharf, which you may visit in downtown Charleston, was the site through which most Africans were brought to America into slavery. We have a very painful history here, and that history is still with us. On April 1st in 1835, South Carolina passed a law making it against the law, making it a crime to teach anyone of color to read and write. The punishment for a white person was $100 fine and up to six months in jail. The punishment for a person of color teaching anyone to read and write was up to 50 lashes and $50 fine. So it absolutely stopped the education of African Americans in our state, and we're still paying the price for that. Our painful history, our institutionalized programs that separated people and never brought them back together well across the board. Here in Charleston County, we have some of the nation's highest performing schools, and we have the lowest performing schools in South Carolina. So if you look across our county, it looks as though we're doing well in terms of averages. Mark Twain said, if I had one foot in a bucket of boiling water, one foot in a bucket of ice cold water, on average, I'd be comfortable. And so we have lived for too long with this comfort, without looking at the fact that thousands of our local citizens cannot access the opportunities that they need. The best way to bring children from multi-generational poverty into a standard of living that all of us would want is through education into a living wage job. So the second big barrier we face is a systemic barrier. The system we've inherited was never designed to bring old children to high levels of proficiency. It is a time-based factory model batch processing system. We graduate students based on a number of Carnegie units they've earned. That's a time-based indicator. And any more, a high school diploma has very little to do with what's relevant for readiness in the workplace. So bottom line for us, for all of us in this region, is that apprenticeships are a high leverage opportunity for us. They force our system to look at real measures of readiness and indicators of proficiency along the way, so that we truly are looking at what it takes to make sure that every year, every student grows in three dimensions. Academically, soft skills, and self-efficacy. If we can build our own accountability system to make sure that we're working 0-20, birth to workplace, across our different institutions, that will be the key to addressing our historical inequities while at the same time honoring our nation's needs. Thank you. Love the Super Bowl story. Let me shift to Berkeley. So Berkeley is smaller, right? There's about 10,000 students. Is that about right? Something there abouts? Berkeley County is actually the fourth largest. Fourth largest? Okay. So it's large, not as big as the Charleston. Okay. I guess I'm curious on a scale issue. How were you able to, why did your county decide to make this a priority? Some of the same reasons we just heard. And have you been able to maintain support for this as you've gone through the first few years? So absolutely. Oh, I think they should all be operational, right? We'll see. How about now? All right. So some of the same reasons that Dr. Postaway just pointed out, absolutely. And the landscape of Berkeley County itself has changed drastically, probably since 2006. And 2006, and even heading into the great recession, I guess, Berkeley County, the enrollment in Berkeley County continued to grow and the population continued to increase. So we even grew through the recession. And as I said, we're currently the fourth largest school district in the state of South Carolina. And one of the fastest growing counties in South Carolina, and according to a 2017 study, the 17th fastest growing county in the nation. So our enrollment continues to increase at the rate of about 1,000 students per year. Sometimes we see 1,200. Sometimes we see 1,400 student increase. And the reason we see that increase in population and increase in enrollment is our business-friendly environment. Our county government has a saying that Berkeley County is open for business. And we even have a catchy little phrase and website as well to recruit businesses to our area. And we're not just recruiting stateside. We're also recruiting internationally. So with that, we continue to have more industry come to our area. So we're doing a great job of graduating our students as Dr. Postaway pointed out. But what do we graduate in our students to? Our talent demand study has pointed out that over the next four years, there's going to be 35,000 jobs, new jobs coming to the area. And of those 35,000 jobs, 45% of those will require some sort of certification or associate's degree. And in our area currently, 39% of our population, they have those credentials. But those folks are already working. So those folks are already working. They can't fill those additional vacancies. So we see the youth apprenticeship as an opportunity to truly prepare our students for their future. Our superintendent likes to say, you know, we have to educate students for their future, not our past. And this is truly indicative of our students' future. Thank you. Thank you. I want to follow up just with both of you real quick on the kind of overall messaging and framework here on this because I heard it earlier from your colleagues at Pride and I heard it throughout what you just said as well. But I think it's a really important issue to get on the table that I'm hearing you say college and career. I'm not hearing you say college or career. In other words, when I listened to the program get kind of unpacked earlier and even in your initial comments, I heard you say this is a pathway into post-secondary education training rather than an alternative pathway. And I say that because I think in a lot of places around the country where this gets brought up at the K-12 level, whether it's apprenticeship, work-based learning in general, or even CTE and career pathways, it can sometimes be thought of as the sort of other path. And perhaps 20 years ago that made sense and the economy enabled you to, as you said, get a good job right out of high school with a diploma, but we know right now that's not the case. So how hard has it been to build that initiative so that it is inclusive of post-secondary education and training rather than viewed as a potential alternative and a way to just go get a job right after high school and not continue your education and training? You said how difficult is it? I think the most difficult part is changing the perception that our parents may have. And I have many of those same types of family members. My child will graduate from high school and will go directly into a four-year school. And despite the information that we may give the parent and the students about these four-year degrees and the opportunities that may exist after they exit those colleges or universities and compare those to the opportunities that they have by going to a trident or participating in an apprenticeship program, that's been difficult. But I think the more success stories that we're able to share with our students and with our families and with our parents, I think that that mission becomes a little bit easier. Thank you. How about from the Charleston District? So I would just add very briefly, in addition to overcoming the obstacle with parents, which is becoming easier with the accumulation of college debt and the awareness of the burden that that places on individuals and families, our challenge is also internal with the inertia of the current system. And the lack of understanding among many educators about the opportunities that are available and the level of sophisticated skill that is required, there's still this feeling that there is somewhere out there that children who aren't thriving in school can be successful in the workplace. And that simply isn't the case. So it is a challenge, but we're slowly overcoming it. As we've opened up schools that intentionally prepare our children to start taking dual enrollment credits by their junior year of high school, we find that those schools have a waiting list that we can't fill. So there is definitely a dawning awareness. That's great. Glad to hear that. Let me shift a little bit to the folks who are actually leading the work on the ground in the schools or in the district offices on a regular basis. And maybe, Sonia, start with you because you have, is it Career Academies in Berkeley? So it sounds like you have a strategy to build these pathways that I was describing. And I'd love to just hear a little bit more about what those Career Academies look like and how the apprenticeships fit in and become part of the DNA and the curriculum, if you will, rather than kind of sitting off outside of the program. Okay. So in Berkeley County, we have Career Academies, which we call the Academies of Berkeley County. And with Career Academies, what we do is that we divide students based on career interests. So we break them into smaller communities based on the career interests. Every year, starting in the eighth grade, our students participate in an individual graduation plan meeting with their school counselor along with the parent and the student. And at that time, they discuss career interests, career opportunities, and they discuss pathways. So in our district, we start talking about apprenticeships in the middle school. We talk about a two-year option path, the four-year option path. We talk about military as well as straight on-the-job training, possibly through our CTE programs. So we start introducing all of these pathways to our students in the middle school. And these meetings continue on throughout the high school career of a student. So as students are divided into these Career Academies, we're able to target learning experiences and special programs for our students based on their career interests in the Academies. Now, the mission of our Academies is really to prepare students for college and careers. As you said before, we want to have our students foster a relationship with their parents, teachers, counselors, community partners, as well as business partners. And we want our students to engage in authentic, relevant workplace learning experiences and be engaged in problem-based learning. So with the mission and to see how apprenticeships tie directly into that, so the first part of that statement is preparing students for college and careers. Well, the apprenticeship program does that. The students are taking college classes here at Trinidad Technical College, so they're getting that experience and they're knowing what that means to be a college student. In addition to that, they have a real, relevant, authentic workplace learning experience with their partners. Now, the relationship part, the mentor experience that these students receive is simply awesome because whenever I speak to businesses, and I'm sure you hear all the time, we're told that we need to better prepare our students in the area of workplace readiness, their skills, their soft skills. Now, we are doing a lot in our county as well as Charleston County and Dorchester County as a Tri-County effort to make sure that we are trying to put this into our curriculum, soft skills. But what better way for a student to experience that than to have a relationship with a business partner so that they can experience that directly? So we feel that that's very important for our students. And so that's just to tie in how our apprenticeship program directly relates to our career academies. And also, we have a seamless transition from our programs. Many of the programs that are in the apprenticeship programs we have in our schools. So our students can transition, and some we do not have. So it's an excellent opportunity for students to explore careers and to get started on their path. Great to hear, great to hear, can you hear me? Great to hear that you start early. One of these will work. Speaking, so I want to go down the road to Tricia for a minute just because I want to stay in, sorry, we're going to come back to you Chad, I promise, I promise. Because we raised this, you've each raised this issue of needing to kind of convince families, educate families about the importance of this and how it is college and career and that this is about the new economy and all the things that we all know, but oftentimes families and students really don't understand those major shifts that have happened. Talk to us because you're in the school, you're in high school, you're in charge of counseling and you have a role in helping young people make decisions about this, it's great to hear this already starts in middle school, the education process, but talk to us about how you work with the students and the families to get them interested in this and have you kind of gotten to a tipping point where people already know about it and now they want to be a part of it or are you still working to help them understand? Well it's been a couple of years that we've been working on this in Berkeley County, can you hear me? So I am the boots on the ground, I am working with the families directly, with the parents and the students. In all of our counties we realized early on with these apprentice that we need to have these conversations with the school counselors. They need to be the ones that are knowledgeable about the programs, the next steps where they're headed and tie it all into our individual graduation plan. We're fortunate in South Carolina we're required to do these, but we really do start earlier than eighth grade we have our school counselors talking about it as early as elementary school. So that is one of the biggest challenges we have at the high school. It's part of the conversation every time we meet with students, every time we meet with our families we talk about the next step, what's your goal and we relate that goal back to if it is a youth apprenticeship program to use apprentice or if it's something completely different we relate it back to whatever programs we have within our school that can serve those students. So it's getting that mindset change of parents and even some of our educators in the classroom to understand that youth apprentice is just a stepping stone. This is a path to your next choice in life. And so every year especially we hit them really hard in 10th grade. We know that the youth apprentice parent day is coming up. I think we increased enrollment exponentially from year one to year two and now they have thousand parents coming to hear about these programs. We have them in a guide that the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce has put together. It's a mindset change but I think we get in there. Now parents come in and actually ask about it. We connect them to our career academies when we have guest speakers come into the classrooms or we do bunch of learnings in middle schools and we're also fortunate I think in your state you have career specialists that are helping promote those. Thank you. Alright Chad you've been very patient here. So I was intrigued that your title is the Work-Based Learning Coordinator for the district for Charleston, right? And just having done a lot of work in other parts of the country it's not often you actually have someone whose role it is, a full-time role to be in charge of that. Talk to us about how that role came to be and what are your kind of major responsibilities in trying to drive this work, right? I understand there's probably a lot of work in working with employers I'm sure there's a lot of work in working with the schools themselves to make sure the program is kind of scaling in a high quality way or you know are you kind of the intermediary glue there talk to us about it and again how and why was that position even created? That's a great question. So six years ago I got a chance to join the district so six years ago I got a chance to join the district and as was mentioned I got a chance to be a volunteer prior to that and prior to that I was a business in the community and that's really where my passion comes from. Thankfully the district recognized an opportunity and it was ginger riders at the time we all know ginger and she said you know I think that we need some help with this could you take on this and do a start up and that was kind of my skill set starting new businesses had started several of my career after finishing college it was a match I didn't have really I tell people all the time I get to be the work based on a partnership coordinator from Trostey County school district and I get to work with the amazing CT sports team and I get to work with 10 career specialists that are in the field and sport their efforts to make sure students in our school district and throughout our region know about amazing opportunities that await them thanks to our economic success and development globally got a long year and a year and a half as they come up on the stage next time I believe but I also get to work with the educators and make sure they know the good news I get to work with the families and make sure they know the good news and we do this in cooperation regionally it's an honor honestly okay I appreciate that so take us a little step further because it's hard right in many cases that role doesn't exist or it's frankly beyond one person to pull off all the work that gets done what are the kind of two or three I'm not this wasn't a setup I know you might need more staff that's not wasn't the point what are the two or three biggest things you have to do on a day to day basis what are what are your top three priorities in your role you're a leadership based you know maintaining the relationships making sure the trust is there so that when we say we can deliver a student that's prepared for the opportunity that's being offered that we can deliver that as a former employer and having been through many many interviews with with youth you know they can be immature because they get to be because they're they're young that's that we give them that grace however we can best prepare them and make sure that when we expect as employers to maximize the opportunity not only the interview but the second day in the twelfth day is not really what they do on the first day but what they do and not what they do in the last day is what what they do in the middle that the employers want to see and we try to really pre-qualify the awareness for that so you know I could talk a lot all day no that's helpful so you gotta gotta make sure the students are prepared enough that the employers or is that being done at the kind of the larger broader level and you're just and you're benefiting from that well it's a team effort honestly it starts with awareness and as has been mentioned there's career cafes that happen in the high school middle schools and even elementary schools that introduce the concept to the students that might not yet be aware that might lead to a single day job shadow experience that we facilitate and thankfully have funding to under underwrite that might lead to a structured field study more than a group of students get to go on a field trip and see what it looks like to be at Boeing or many other companies and not just manufacturers obviously many high demand wage high wage jobs in our region and it then can lead to an internship and that internship might just be a semester but that's a big deal for a student because they're still they're thinking in you know weeks and in days and as adults we tend to think more in years and in decades and I've found to find myself with my kids getting older and I think that when we offer the internship it's great to be able to talk about how that could lead to a youth apprenticeship and that the time spent in the internship can often be counted because it does it is the job related education that's happening within the company so we've got a seamless progression hopefully happening in concert with their individual graduation plan that's really helpful so you have a continuum with the apprenticeship being kind of the culminating most significant way to participate but there are other gradual ways to get involved the entrepreneurship is the Holy Grail okay I didn't say that how about in Berkeley same thing do you have a continuum of experiences work based learning experiences with the apprenticeship being kind of the way to kind of max out and do the whole thing yes yes so you know our students very similar to what Chad said you know participate in shadow experiences they could do co-op experiences to their career and technical education programs if they have that we also have a course in career studies which we call internship if students have an interest in the area that you know we may not have a CT program then they could do that but also to give students the opportunity of the apprenticeship opportunity and that's sort of like the pinnacle because they're getting that education and they're getting that work experience and it's like a two year program okay that's helpful what's on employer on the challenge of getting employers involved a little bit more deeply because it's impressive numbers that you've achieved here and I'm very curious how you've been able to do that in many cases when we've watched other communities or states try to do this for youth apprenticeship just a whole different ball game to get employers to think about K-12 students as a talent source there's a talent pipeline and that source is just kind of a corporate social responsibility gesture to be part of something like this little easier often times when they think of community college students or students in post secondary how have you been able to design this initiative so that employers see your high school students as potential sources talent sources now and in the future what I talked about secret sauce earlier but really difficult to get to a place where that dynamic exists how has that played out in each of your districts well I think for the employers I think when after the initial class that we had with the apprenticeship and I'll just describe because that was my first year on the job I was just starting when I went to the apprenticeship breakfast in August and I just started in July right and so and I would describe it was exciting but I would describe the atmosphere as being intimate because it was kind of small and to see it from that point up to now there's so much excitement so much hustle and bustle just because of the volume of employers that we have that word of mouth and the success of our students has just been just been great to get more of the employers on and I know as I deal with employers and I know Chad does as well we talk about and when they talk about what they need from us as far as students like well maybe we can do an internship I was like well have you considered an apprenticeship program and then I would tell them to reach out to Melissa and Mitch to get more information about that but I think the more everyone sells the program I think it would be helpful to get more employers on. Okay thank you and anyone else on this and feel free to speak to the power of partnership with Trident in other words an institution that I'm sure is regularly dealing with employers whereas with K-12 school systems sometimes that's not part of what we regularly do so feel free to speak to how that may have contributed as well. No problem the first thing I thought of on the initial question was the fear in HR departments that we initially approached we're just scared a student that's 18 or younger in their environment manufacturing environment can be dangerous hazardous and basically the blanket policy was we don't have people under 18 doing these things so we had to overcome that how do you overcome that well you tell them the good news there are exceptions for hazardous things there's ways to overcome this there's student learners designation Trident Technical College our great partner in this is has the insurance as well so we can overcome that and dispel myths so I think also we you know the return on investments on the end of the year for all the audiences really all the stakeholders and I think the when you think about how athletics recruits there next you know star athlete in basketball football baseball soccer whatever it is well they're reaching down to eighth grade if a kid's making 30 points a game in eighth grade and they're 6-2 how do the best colleges know about them well because they're looking for them that young even younger right well how do our high demand high wage jobs need to find them the same way they need to reach down into the high schools and identify make a relationship with them and let them know the good news about if you know if you want to work in the automotive industry in this community oh my goodness there are some opportunities oh my goodness there might be a career camp maybe you should come on a structured field study maybe it's a student taking a leadership role in their future that demands the opportunity or request maybe they do demand it right maybe they say I want to go to Mercedes I want to see those robots I want to know why Megatronics is the best investment of my time in high school because my school counselor mentioned it doing my individual graduation plan and my parents are telling me I need to go to Clemson to study engineering but I think I can get a better return on investment with my time by doing this track let's talk about that I'd like to excuse me just say a word about the power of the partnership with Trident Technical College and the local team as a systems leader Chad and his team work really hard but we do none of the heavy lifting on engaging the businesses to sponsor the apprenticeships Trident Technical College the chamber have done all of the all of the work on that and so while we work hard to prove that we can fill the opportunities with young people who are mature and capable they take care of all of that for us I think in the region we are all deeply worried about the talent pipeline so whether you're part of the school system employment machine or a mom and pop business or a multinational corporation the talent pipeline is the number one challenge right now we met with a contractor this past week who told us that our Charleston unemployment rate is at 2.4% and yet we have thousands and thousands of family in deep multi-generational poverty because we haven't been able to lift people up to meet that opportunity so the business community another thing I mentioned in South Carolina the legislature changed the funding formula for schools traditionally there's a three-legged school with income tax property taxes on homes and business taxes South Carolina legislature changed the law so that home owners primary home owners no longer pay any taxes whatsoever on their homes the business community shoulders the primary tax burden for us and they have been wonderful not at all critical even though there's much to be critical of they have approached us in a spirit of partnership of collaboration and in turn the three districts have said the accountability system that we have in place that meets the requirements of the state and federal government is not sufficient we really need to know how many children exit our schools well prepared to go into the military at a score of 31 or better on the ASVAB with no arrests how many go to Trident Technical College without need for remediation how many are graduating or being graduated with career certifications and how many are going on to four-year colleges and all those who matriculate what's the success rate in two years that's the metric that's the metric and so we're building in conjunction with our local business community parents and institutions of higher education a much better system of accountability which then drives the focus to proficiency competency and preparedness along the way growth not the delivery of covering standards in a curriculum and that is huge that's why it is it is the Archimedes it's the huge lever that can change this system because it creates this larger community common ground a better way a better life a better standard of living for many families the talent pool that's needed by industry and strengthened communities that's impressive the metrics you just spoke to if that's what your community is holding itself and you frankly accountable for delivering I think that's a wonderful set of future oriented metrics that when I say future oriented what are we setting young people up to do and are we measuring whether they're successful in their next steps which is what I heard you say with a heavy focus on post-secondary readiness broadly defined that's what we're seeing communities and states around the country are trying to move in that same direction with their metrics I'm really glad you pointed that out because without those kinds of metrics sometimes it can be hard to maintain community support and policymaker support for these initiatives especially when they require investments I also heard you all sort of speak to the importance of Trident as a partner and you mentioned the Chamber of Commerce here right as that you said they do all the work I'm sure they would say you do a lot of the work but what I took that to mean is the work of getting the businesses involved and convincing them that this is going to give them that ROI and that they have kind of barriers can be removed like liability issues and other things like that they are actually doing so that you all don't have to solve those problems you just have to work on delivering high quality programs and students who are ready to participate and be successful that I just wanted to kind of get that back out there I think in communities around the country figuring out who those partners are who can deliver the employers who can serve as that intermediary between employers and the school systems is on everyone's minds I know we're going to be talking about that a little bit tomorrow in one of the breakout sessions but it's a it's a capacity that often doesn't exist in certain communities and states and everyone's trying to figure out how you build it so I think we'll want to learn more over the course of the two days about how that capacity got built and what it looks like here in your region. It was Mitch and Melissa and their amazing work and the teamwork that came together that made this possible Mitch's relationship of trust with the employers that already offered adult apprenticeships and Trinitec in our region was able to leverage that and come in with a new program at the time you know if you frame the question right every business in our community wants to say yes to education if it's framed correctly I would agree however I think getting from that initial conversation to keeping them at the table for the long term is very challenging in fact I was going to ask and I think I'm going to look to see if we can also get folks in the audience want to ask questions in a minute I was going to ask everybody when I looked at that impressive data about the scaling of this initiative what was it going from one pathway in six companies over several years to 18 pathways 150 companies that's a lot of growth obviously that means people are recognizing the power and the impact seems to me then the pressure would be on all of you to make sure the quality is there and that the results are there as you scale and oftentimes scaling anything is hard when you try to maintain the quality control and have really important metrics that you're looking at talk to us about what's been hard about scaling from one to 18 pathways and from six to 150 companies well as you mentioned from a district level and from a school level even from a school level you know we have to be able to ensure the quality that we're referring to the apprenticeship programs to make sure that they meet the aptitude the level of qualification level which has been established but also the fact that they're going to follow through and actually complete the program so Sonia mentioned salt skills earlier and that's really been a major focus of ours the other thing is to make sure that our school counselors and also our administrators have also bought into the concept and the program and that while Sonia is an advocate in Berkeley County and Trish here she's at her school and she's an advocate but we also need our administrators to be advocates as well and promote the apprenticeship program in order to meet the needs not just meeting the needs but our industry partners we're also helping meet the needs of our students and acquire skills that they will need for the future Thank you, anyone else on what's hard about scaling or maybe it's been easy, has it been easy to scale? I would say you know it's been somewhat challenging just as Deanna said making sure that everyone is on board and with everyone in our district being on board just pushing that out to the parents to just let them see the opportunities that are available I think we are moving forward with that and we have made tremendous gains with our parents to show them the different pathways to a career because as you said before some of them still think college or career but it's really important to show them how an apprenticeship if you think your child is four year the apprenticeship program is a great way to get them to that also but with some good work related experience and confirmation of this is exactly what I want to do so I think when everyone on board and just placing that in the minds of parents and trying to change their mindset to push their students in a multitude of pathways versus just one pathway to their career Thank you and I would still maintain that the major challenge to scale is the system design flaw and systems failure is no one's fault but it's everyone's responsibility and the kind of batch processing system that we have might arguably have been acceptable in post World War II in an industrialized era but it simply will not work today and we cannot continue to send children through the system who cannot access process, retrieve and produce information, we cannot there are no jobs for young people who don't have high literacy and numeracy skills the sort of work ethic or soft skills and a sense of self advocacy self agency that is absolutely essential and it is Harry Truman said one could more easily move the family cemetery than change public education and it is just extremely difficult with the emphasis on teaching grade level standards to shift the emphasis to doing what we know we need to do to make sure all children exit our system with greater life choices than they would have had had they not been with us that is the mission I really appreciate that and I appreciate the focus this morning on equity and how you stated the historical challenge that you are working on here and I think a lot of folks around the country are working on this so I will say that I think the reason that you have grade level standards to begin with in this country was to try to combat the equity challenge where an A in one school really equal to D in another school so to me at least I think what you are speaking to here is the importance of not moving away from high expectations and common expectations for all students but trying to transform that conversation into ready for your next steps not simply ready to meet grade level standards and looking toward the future of when our young people are going to get out of school and they have to be able to build kind of fulfilling careers and their metrics you are talking about earlier speak to that in big ways let me just ask a question about an integrity issue that everybody struggles with when they are scaling work based learning and apprenticeships which is transportation eventually it is going to come up I am sure it will come up a lot in the two days here so I just want to get it out on the table and figure out how you have gone how you have scaled this program and gotten all these employers involved and have all these students participating how have you gotten them to these sites and work through the transportation issues well transportation continues to be an issue with our students in Berkeley County we are the largest county land wise in the state of South Carolina so it does pose a challenge sometimes especially for our students in the rural areas to obtain transportation to get to their site but I will say that Trotter has done a really good job of reaching out to employers that are in those communities that participate in the apprenticeship program and that is really growing and it is really great when we have students in our rural communities who can participate in the program where the distance is not as far Thank you. Any other comments on transportation? It is a challenge it will always be a challenge and if a student does not have their own wheels our transportation system in our community is not like it is in New York or Atlanta or big metros with a train they have to have a car and so if we start the discussion early as the IGP process unfolds and say if this is something you are aiming for think about four wheels and a steering wheel you can get a car for two or three thousand dollars it might not be the best car ever but it can get you to this amazing opportunity and so I think starting to play in early and I think parents are understanding that but it is not the only way we have to be creative as well It has been a big challenge and we find that local donors are willing to help students find or to help provide vehicles even for children when you are working with children with multi-generational poverty and you have to think about helping get driver's license because it could be that no one in the family has ever had a license and the family does not own an automobile and then locally our partners have worked with area rapid transit companies so they are going to start allowing our students to ride free so we have allocated money for CARTA the public transportation and with parental permission or at certain ages students we use things like Uber we try not to let transportation become an obstacle that keeps a child from an opportunity but it must be thought about and budgeted for and you have to get really creative and the final thing I'll say about that is you can also use your own school buses if you get the high schools to schedule creatively one thing we haven't mentioned is we all use block scheduling at the high school so if you use semester block scheduling students have the opportunity to take eight different classes per year so they can double up classes and if you schedule creatively you can get children near a job site by using the buses that are running in large systems but it does take a lot of creative thinking and a determination to just do it. Fire in the belly alright thank you I want to open it up we have a few more minutes remaining in this session I want to see if anyone has a question or two they want to pose to the panel we got a couple on this end of the mic runners and just quickly tell us who you are and then pose your question thanks hi Susie Levine from Washington State I'm our commissioner of our workforce agency and I'm also a former ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein and I have a couple of questions for you all first off it's amazing what you're doing thank you for your dedication and the fire in your belly that you all have I heard you all mention college and career question for you all do you ever anticipate a time when you will say career where college is one of the many equal pathways to get to career well we've tried that and we got so much push back so I'll say that that is ultimately the goal right and college is one pathway so it really is career ready depending on what career one chooses but particularly if you've lived a place where pathways to best however one defines that have not been open to everyone it was important to say both for a little while so as we aspire to lots of different opportunities and equity and access and success that certainly is the ultimate goal and it's what we mean but it became such a the fight was taking more time than it was worth and that's a mindset change as well because with my own child my son someone asked him one time what would you like to do what would you like to do once you complete high school and he said I'm going to college I want to go to college and I listened to him and after that conversation he had with that person I said to him that was not the correct answer I said you need to be able to explain what your career is because he has no clue any idea of a career he was thinking college and I have work to do on that also but that's what he hears in school and I would say family as well and so I explained to him you need to have a career what you think you may be interested in doing with the rest of your life and then I explained to him that here are the pathways to get to the career that you would like and we talked about all the different options and I explained to him that college is a pathway it's not or what you want to do once you leave high school that's exactly what I was going to say as a school counselor that's how we start our conversations is so what do you want to do when you finish high school where you head at what's your career what does it look like 5 years 10 years down the road then as they start talking about it then we start plugging in well how are you going to get there so we don't start off with are you going to four year college or two year college or are you going to military we start off with what's your goal in fact that's one of our students at our school we do that throughout Berkeley County I used to work with all the school counselors and that was kind of always our conversations with our kids and still is you know what's your goal what's your plan where you headed and then how do you plug that in and you know the other thing as Zion said it's a mindset it's a paradigm shift you have to realize that a placement in an apprenticeship or even a job after the apprenticeship that's not a sentence it's not an indictment you still have an opportunity to continue your education pursuits you still have an opportunity to go to finish their their degree or get that something that they choose to do so the effort is to communicate that officially and often as soon as possible the majority of students in higher ed in this country are part-time today it wasn't the case years ago at that point they're working and they're trying to kind of up skill along the way and I'm glad you raised the counseling issue as a key fundamental lever here and a challenging one to work through in the high schools in terms of the career side let me make sure we get time for a few more questions there's one right here in the red maybe I am there hi Lacey McManus with GNO Inc with the Economic Development Alliance for the Greater New Orleans region in southeast Louisiana so just a question and I understand that the Chamber and Trident have done a great job doing the recruitment of these companies but I'm curious who does I guess you could say the hand holding or case management after the companies are brought on to ensure that they have a positive experience throughout the tenure of the apprenticeship Mitch so all within Trident still and the Chamber and we all I was going to say and the school counselors you know touching base with our kids making sure they're happy it's just as important as the employer being happy if there's any problems any issues working with them on some of those soft skills they may not have developed yet and Ellen also is the mom figure for the apprenticeship program and so she knows the students and she makes sure that that side of it as a school counselor kind of person trying to attack is happening apprenticeship Carolina I'm hearing in the question I do hope this can be explored more deeply over the next two days is it's probably not about one person and just hiring that magic person but what organization or partnership organizations is carrying that load of bringing employers to the table and getting them to stay at the table which is harder than bringing them to the table and what does that look like what's that work look like what kind of credibility does that organization or partnership need to have what kind of capacity does it need to have to hear that work so that it can be successful I think these are not insignificant issues so I'm glad you raised it and obviously we've got a little bit of a feel for it here on the panel but I'm quite sure we're going to delve into it much more deeply over the next two days and frankly it's going to be a major priority of PIA over the next few years because we see that as a big hurdle to overcome in communities like yours around the country all right time for do we have time for one or two more questions right here thank you Hi good morning my name is Carolyn Jones and I am with the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Disability Employment Policy and my question is the unemployment rate of people with disabilities is double that of their non-disabled peers are you using intermediary or what's the intersectionality between getting people or youth within the school system involved in work based learning specifically a partnership what does that look wants to take this so the major challenge is that most of the A major challenges that most of the positions that have been available for apprenticeships are positions that require a very high level of skill that does not rule out any individual with disabilities that just depends on their ability to demonstrate the skill that IEPs of some secondary students who are close have been redesigned to try to make us be more intentional about getting ready so we find it takes a longer run time a longer ramp and make sure that we're thinking they're being very intentional about that and then we're partnering locally regionally with the goodwill industries to try to help us with other students whose gifts and skills are not going to align with the more traditional apprenticeships and to find placements so we've been very intentional about that but it is still an area of challenge. Thank you. Can I just have a quick follow up in terms of that and in terms of the challenge it seems like it's a challenge we've done a lot of research particularly on apprenticeship and we have a lot of demonstrations going on all over the nation in which I can share information with you to help you with those unramps to the various apprenticeship programs Thank you. Appreciate the idea and the offer to continue to support this work I really want to thank all of our panelists here from the two districts who are really doing amazing work with their partners who came up earlier. Please join me in thanking our panelists and I want to just encourage everyone to keep these conversations going and this is just the beginning so over the next two days we'll go deep so thank you. Back to you.