High School enrollment has been
declining rapidly, and this trend is expected to continue.
The Schedule below is the Projection
for student enrollment for the High School for the periods shown and comments
by the Superintendent.
This trend is not new and should have
been addressed long ago. Many of our students, in all three towns, are going to
other schools for public or private High School.
We have only a school for college preparation;
however this is not doing enough for the future. Discouraging students from
their choice of practical areas of study may be a problem. During the current
economic cycle our students are going off to college and returning 4 years
later with a large amount of debt and no job opportunities.
We need a new paradigm for the future;
a pathway not just for education, but for future employment.
The one size fits all solution of
going to college is not working. There are lawyers becoming firemen, college
grads changing to electricians, nursing or some other field. The career they mastered
in college is not leading to a job. We need to plan for what jobs will be there
for our student down the road.
District 14 has agriculture and Abbott
Tech has culinary and other hands on training, from culinary arts to
electrical.
Parents will be more receptive to
other programs as college becomes more expensive and jobs are scarce.
We can and must develop programs that
will encourage our students to stay with us and draw students in from other
towns.
If we look at large employers, let’s
take Healthcare for example, they have many types of employees. Nurses,
Physician Assistants, X-ray, and all sorts of other Technicians. We could
develop credits earned or certificate programs to encourage students into a
practical area of study with future job opportunities.
There will be 67 in the graduating
class in 14/15 and in 22/23 it will decrease further to 40.
The Administration must develop a plan
that increases the number of graduates back over 100. The expensive risk of
investing millions in repairs is unfair financially for the towns without new
goals for success. You must know what changes need to be made in the Shepaug building
for any new programs before allocating large amounts of funds for repairs.
We need to downsize, reconfigure the
use of the existing buildings and not put the towns in any further debt until a reasonable plan is developed for the future.
Closing a High School is forever. SOS
strongly disapproves the “Tuition Out” program at this time, however it cannot
be ruled out if we can’t reverse the declining trend.
If this does not happen, we will not be able to maintain current programs and that will lead to the
closing of the High School.
Region 12 Public School Enrollment Projection (From Superintendent’s Office Report)
Here are a few Articles and Opinions on this matter:
College boosts tech careers,gets high school students on track
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WATERBURY — Edgardo Ortiz didn't have much ambition while a student at Crosby High School. He saw himself working a job at Wal-Mart or McDonald's, possibly attending a college for a course or two. But a college degree? That didn't seem feasible.
Now he works full-time at Contec Inc., a Naugatuck manufacturing company, attends classes toward an associate degree at Naugatuck Valley Community
College and plans on earning his bachelor's degree in engineering. Ten or 20 years from now, he hopes to open his own business, although he's still waiting for that great idea.
Ortiz, 20, credits a college connection program his senior year
at Crosby that introduced him to manufacturing as a career.
Northwestern Connecticut Community College will be looking to offer a similar program for juniors and seniors from area local high school that could mean students finishing high school with a high school diploma and college credit that can go toward an associate degree in technology studies.
The college classes would be taught at Oliver Wolcott Technical High School after school. High school students would take their core classes like math (pre-calculus and algebra) and English while doing the technical classes at the state trade school.
How many seats the program will have and the cost is not known but Torrington High School will have six slots and Superintendent Cheryl F. Kloczko hopes she can fill with juniors in the fall.
Kloczko and members of the Board of Education’s school improvement committee, who had been discussing a similar version, hope that Torrington High School students like Ortiz can find focus and develop a passion that has yet to be tapped.
The timing couldn’t be more crucial as local manufacturers have been working on ways to boost the number of job applicants in the years to come.
There are hundreds of manufacturing jobs in Northwest Connecticut that cannot be filled and more are expected as an aging workforce prepares to retire, according to Kevin Canady of Northwestern Connecticut Community College’s Center for Workforce Development.
“There’s over 4,000 manufacturing companies in the state of Connecticut but here in Northwest Connecticut we have over 300 and not just your average manufacturing companies. We have aerospace ... and pharmaceutical,” Canady said. “We’re trying to entice the youth that there’s an opportunity here. If we try to attract those at a younger age and make them more aware of what’s out there, we believe we help out those companies and the students.”
John N. Lavieri, president of Sterling Engineering in Barkhamsted, said he believes the reason for the shortage is that young people are misinformed about a career in manufacturing. They think it’s dirty and mindless work that involves pulling a lever all day.
“They have an image of manufacturing companies of the 60s and 70s when it’s very different,” Lavieri said. “Today, to be competitive, we must be clean, orderly.”
Decades ago, manufacturing companies also had more applicants to choose from as large corporations like Pratt & Whitney and Sikorsky churned out skilled workers through an apprenticeship programs. The program involved between 6,000 to 8,000 hours of work.
Now, that education typically comes from the technical schools, community colleges
and from partnerships with high schools and community colleges. Last year, 40 individuals completed a level two manufacturing certificate at Naugatuck Valley Community College and more than 30 have been placed in fulltime work.
Ortiz went to earn his level two certificate following the college connection program.
Since 2010, 83 students from Waterbury’s three high schools have completed the college connection program, which is funded by the Waterbury Board of Education, according to Michael Hayden, manager of Northwest Regional Workforce Investment Board.
Ortiz worked as an intern at Contec and worked 16 hours a week for eight weeks before being hired full time.
Contec owner Craig Corbett said the college connection program has been a “talent pipeline” and said Ortiz has been a “home run” for the company.
“They hit the floor with their feet running,” Corbett said.
Contec, a small business with 12 employees, doesn’t face the same dilemma larger manufacturing companies face with an aging workforce. But when openings came up, two positions were filled with the college connection program.
The starting pay is between $10 and $15 an hour, Corbett said.
Northwest Connecticut Community College in Winsted already offers a sixmonth intensive manufacturing program to introduce veterans or unemployed or underemployed individuals into the manufacturing workforce. That is a noncredit program. Oliver Wolcott principal Robert Axon said technical high school previously partnered with schools in the past.
“We’re always looking into ways of doing it but it’s all about funding and budgets and how much will it cost for programs like that,” Axon said.
Is
college choice a big factor when applying for a job?
April 6,
2014 | 9:00pm
Our daughter needs to choose which college she is going to attend, and we are debating which one will position her best for a job after graduation. How important is this decision in terms of her ability to get a job?
With little else to go on but some internships, perhaps, the quality of the school from which one graduates is most important at the entry-level stage. However, as one moves along in their career, the quality of their employment history and work experience far outweighs the quality of the undergraduate institution — by far. But the first criteria is where your daughter thinks she will be the happiest — because being unhappy in a bigger “name” school is no way for her to spend the next four years of her life. The bottom line is: CEOs, doctors, lawyers, teachers, finance executives, etc. come from every tier level of college — and some don’t even have college degrees (although I strongly advise getting one!). Pick the best school and environment that offers her the academics and activities that interest her and where she will feel comfortable.
Diminishing
Returns to Higher Education
The U.S. Census Bureau has updated its data (Excel
Spreadsheet) showing the percentage of Americans, Age 25 or older, who have
attended four or more years of college. Our first chart shows how those figures
have changed since 1940 for American men and women:
We observe that there are approximately six
times the percentage of Americans who have completed at least four years of
college in 2013 than there were in 1940.
Now, here's a chart showing how the median wage
and salary income earned by individual American men and women have changed over
much of that same period of time - all figures have been adjusted for inflation
to be in terms of constant 2012 U.S. dollars:
In this chart, after adjusting for inflation,
we see that the median wage and salary income (Excel
Spreadsheet) for U.S. men has risen to be about 1.85 times what it was in
1947, while the median income for U.S. women has risen to be over 2.6 times
what it was in 1947, when the majority of women did not earn any wage or salary
income.
But we also see that in real terms, the median
wage or salary earned by American men has stagnated since the early 1970s, even
though the percentage of the adult male population in the U.S. who have
completed at least four years of college has doubled in that same period of
time. Meanwhile, working American women have seen their incomes stagnate since
2000, even though the share of women Age 25 or older having attended at least
four years of college has grown by 10% over that time.
This outcome strongly suggests that there are
real diminishing returns to higher education in the United States.
