Rural education, workforce groups apprehensive for new diploma requirements
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State education officials continue to tinker with new requirements for high school diplomas, but one thing is clear: work-based learning will play a big part for many future high school students.
The Indiana Department of Education’s most recent revisions call for students to complete a base diploma with stackable “seals” that align with their next steps beyond high school. Both the base diploma and the “employment seal” involve a significant amount of career-focused credits with an emphasis on high schoolers getting professional certificates by the time they graduate.
While business interest groups are generally supportive of the proposed requirements, others in rural parts of the state have concerns about how work-based learning will look in practice.
Not-for-profits who work with both school districts and businesses in rural counties tell Inside INdiana Business they worry about access to transportation and whether there will be enough businesses willing to teach students to make work-based learning work.
“There’s a lot more questions than answers at this point,” said Rusty Inman, executive director of the John Jay Center for Learning in Jay County. “I think there’s good ideas, but I don’t know that they’ve been fully fleshed out before we’ve just dove headfirst into this.”
Lacking bandwidth
The most pressing issue for career training advocates in rural counties is a numbers game. Students in Marion, Hamilton or Allen counties might have a plethora of businesses to choose from when they look at career training.
But in places like Jay County where the Jay Center operates, that’s not the case. Inman says there are some manufacturing opportunities nearby, but unless students want to do that, agriculture or nursing, they’re out of luck.
“Career-technical education has so many faces that I just think it’s going to be tough to get work-based experiences,” Inman said. “In a county of 20,000, where are those work-based experiences going to come from?”
Jim Roberts in Columbus shares Inman’s thought. Roberts is a former superintendent of the Bartholomew Consolidated School District and recently moved to a role as vice president of the Community Education Coalition, which works at forming partnerships and programing between local businesses and schools.
Bartholomew County is home to a number of manufacturers—including a major Toyota Material Handling plant—but Roberts recognizes other counties don’t have that luxury when it comes to finding companies willing and able to take on training high school students.
“I do wonder what the capacity of the businesses would be to satisfy what the demand is likely to be,” Roberts said. “It seems there’s the potential for another access barrier for certain people in certain places.”
Even for businesses that do have partnerships with schools, it’s unclear if they can handle the influx of students that will seek career training once it’s a requirement for graduation.
Indiana Small and Rural School Association Executive Director Chris Lagoni said some companies in rural areas might only be able to teach a handful of students. But how many businesses can scale up their instruction when potentially half of all students in Indiana want on-the-job training remains to be seen.
“We have been doing school-based placements for years and we have a lot of great models,” Lagoni said. “But when we have to scale this up so 40% of all high school students are going to rely on this model for their diploma, that’s a different animal in and of itself. There’s just not enough placements.”
Another concern is transportation—a long-running issue in rural districts just for regular school days. Lagoni said some districts don’t have the ability to bus students over 15 miles to the job training programs they want to take. If those students don’t have a car, that limits their options.
Thinking outside the box
Despite the challenges, some districts have had success in bringing career training to less populated areas.
In DeKalb County, with a population of around 43,000, administrators with the DeKalb County Central United School District had been trying to build partnerships with local manufacturing companies over the past few years with little success.
Thanks to some help from Purdue University’s IN-MaC initiative, DeKalb has eight businesses training high school students in a program that starts with safety certifications for freshmen and progresses to full-scale internships for seniors.
DeKalb Assistant Superintendent Lori Vaughn said the manufacturing career pathway—called Baron Advanced Manufacturing or BAM—now has over 60 kids in its second year and that’s just one of the nearly 30 career paths DeKalb offers to its 1,000 high schoolers.
Vaughn acknowledges there’s been challenges with finding transportation and instructors for certain career paths. But the district has come up with creative solutions, like getting county vehicles to take students off-site when need be.
“We’re not afraid to get out of that box and think about things differently for the benefit of our students,” Vaughn said. “It’s a challenge but we’re working very hard to not let that become a barrier.”
Still, DeKalb’s successful start to its manufacturing program is dependent on businesses being willing to team up—a factor that ultimately isn’t up to school districts. As the DOE draws up the final diploma requirements, Lagoni hopes small districts are judged only by what they can control.
“We just want to make sure that when we get to an evaluation model, it’s based on variables that schools can control,” said Lagoni. “Schools can’t control how many businesses will take people. Schools can’t control what businesses are within a drivable distance from their school.”