The students’ home districts — Agua Dulce, Premont, Brooks County, Freer and Benavides — used to operate separately. They had a shrinking student population, were unable to provide much career and technical education, and struggled with low achievement. But seven years ago, a handshake between the superintendents of the Premont and Freer independent school districts gave rise to what would become the .

Today, the consortium, created to stave off consolidation threats and improve student outcomes, is being lauded as a . And the Texas legislature has encouraged other districts to follow its lead.

The five districts, located 45 to 90 minutes southwest of Corpus Christi and serving a student population that is at least 75% Hispanic, share six academies: Early College, for credit toward an associate degree; Grow Your Own, for future teachers; Ignite Technical Institute, focusing on welding; Next Generation Medical Academy, offering nursing and pharmacy education; Willa Zelaya STEM Discovery Zone, featuring computer technology, drone aviation and robotics; and Trade Winds Academy, for HVAC, construction and electrical.

Students wishing to participate in an academy choose the program they want in eighth grade. They take traditional core classes at their home high school and travel to the academies twice a week and every other Friday — about 10 times a month. 

Sophomore Juliana Farias catches a 6:45 a.m. van, driven by school staff and internet-equipped, at her high school in Agua Dulce for the 45-minute trip to the Grow Your Own Academy. Her friend Emmerson Perez, also a sophomore, does the same in the small town of Freer, nearly an hour west. 

They meet up at Premont Collegiate High School around 7:30 a.m. and walk to a nearby elementary to begin their day as teacher interns. The two won’t be in Premont long. They’ll return to their respective high schools by midday to continue their regular classes. 

Mylan Pena, a junior at Falfurrias High School in Brooks County Independent School District, chose the welding academy because it offers the chance to earn a free associate degree as well as industry credentials. When Pena was a child, his uncle and grandfather worked as oil pipeline welders, leaving home for weeks at a time. It’s a job he wants to pursue after he graduates.

“I’m blessed to even have this opportunity,” he said. “My mom is a single mother. I know she wouldn’t have the funds to provide this for me. Getting the opportunity to take college (classes) for free and learning to weld for free means a lot.”

Pathways like these are more commonly found in larger, wealthier metropolitan school districts. Texas has more schools in rural areas than any other state — about . As families flock to more densely populated communities, rural schools are left with scarce resources and sometimes merge as they struggle to serve isolated towns. 

That was the situation in 2019, when the Rural Schools Innovation Zone officially launched. 

The districts had to find something innovative to keep the doors open, said Michael Gonzalez, Rural Schools Innovation Zone director. “We had no opportunities for kids,” he said. “We needed to do something about it.”

The Premont and Freer districts obtained grant funding and partnered with Brooks County Independent School District to form the consortium. It expanded to include the Agua Dulce and Benavides districts in 2023. The five districts together have about 3,250 students.

Last year, 424 students were enrolled in the academies. Now, there are nearly 600. Gonzalez said 680 are projected to participate in the 2026-27 school year.

It “was phenomenal” how the Rural Schools Innovation Zone turned trends around for the communities in south Texas, Gonzalez said. He’s been the consortium’s director since it was created and was the sole employee for five years, before recently hiring a liaison to help coordinate between the districts and their college partners.

Premont, which had the worst of the partner school districts, increased its student population from 570 students in 2012 to in 2024. From 2018-19 to 2023-24, the school districts the percentage of their graduating students who pass the state’s in both math and reading from 30% to 51%. The percentage of seniors with dual credit jumped from 16% to 50%, while those with industry certifications increased from 8% to 38%.

Based on the program’s success, Texas legislators in 2023 to create a that funds similar collaborations among rural districts. The Rural Schools Innovation Zone is such partnerships across Texas. Last year, lawmakers for career technical and education programs, including the rural collaborations, and promoted them as a key strategy for economic growth in the state. 

Here’s a look inside some of the academies, and what their students have to say about their experiences.

Grow Your Own Educator Academy 

Farias chose the Grow Your Own Educator Academy at Premont Collegiate High School to fulfill dreams she’s had since she was a little girl.

“My mom was an aide for special education students and some of my best friends are autistic, and as a little kid, you don’t realize the differences until you grow up,” she said. “I get a lot of, ‘You don’t want to do special education. It’s a hard place to be and it’s a lot of work.’ But that’s what I want to do, so looking into the program, I was like, ‘I need to be in this. It’s something I want to do and I get to start early on in my life.’”

It was initially intimidating for Farias to travel to Premont, because she was the only Agua Dulce High School student in the teaching academy. But soon she met Perez, from Freer High School, and Ava Gutierrez, a Premont senior.

“They’ve made it so much more than just the program, and I think that’s what keeps our programs going — because we all have relationships within the program that make it so much more than just college hours,” Perez said. “It’s cool because we’re from different districts, but we’re still friends.”

The trio assist classes at Premont’s elementary school and day care before taking college courses at the high school. Premont High School staff teach some of the classes, while others are in person at colleges closer to Corpus Christi, like Texas A&M University’s campus in Kingsville, about 30 miles away.

“On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I was traveling to Kingsville, and then on Monday, Wednesdays and every other Friday, I was in the classroom in Premont,” Gutierrez said. “It was pretty overwhelming for a while, having to travel back and forth, but you get used to it. After a while, it just kind of starts becoming part of your routine.”

Will Zelaya STEM Discovery Zone 

Andrew Herrera, 16, is a junior firefighter for a Brooks County volunteer fire department. He has been known to stay up until 5 a.m. at the station fixing equipment and changing the oil in the fire trucks.

His dad, the department chief, encouraged the Premont sophomore to enroll in the school’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics academy because of his passion for drones and fire truck mechanics. The program offers instruction in computer technology, engineering, oil and gas drilling, robotics and drone aviation. 

Herrera is pursuing a drone pilot license to assist with fire department calls. 

“I want to do it because nowadays it’s been getting a lot more difficult for ranch (owners), since they’re building so many houses and stuff like that,” he said. “If there’s ever a fire, I’ll be able to fly (the drone) up and I can do 3D mapping or I can find better routes for the trucks to take.”

Haven Farias, a Premont senior, earned his drone pilot license this year. He said he’s also proud of his work building a life-size robot in one of his academy classes. The two passions are something he wants to continue to follow when he pursues a mechanical engineering degree in the fall at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas.

“I’m licensed to fly, so I’ll have more opportunities with jobs and everything for the drone side,” Farias said. “I think it’s a great opportunity. Even though I’m in, like, 10,000 sports, and I’m doing five college classes, and then I have to do all my high school classes, it’s not really difficult. It’s all about time management.”

Ignite Technical Institute 

For Amber Garcia, a commitment to achieving an associate degree is what’s kept her going at Ignite Technical Institute, the welding pathway at Falfurrias High School in Brooks County Independent School District. 

The Premont senior works two part-time jobs — sometimes overnight until 6 a.m. — while taking her regular classes, pursuing pathway courses and gaining college credit. Garcia was in the foster system when she was introduced to the Rural Schools Innovation Zone. Now she’s one of the best welders in the program, Gonzalez said, and one of the few female students.

“In my eighth grade year, my older brothers were doing it, and I was kind of inspired by it, but they didn’t like it,” she said. “I wanted to do it. I fell in love with it.”

Garcia said it’s sometimes hard to get up in the mornings and make it to school, but she always attends her welding classes. Gonzalez said he calls her on days she doesn’t travel to Falfurrias to make sure she’s still going to Premont High School. The work has paid off, she said, because soon she’ll go straight into the workforce as a welder.

“A lot of kids are lazy, and our generation is horrible, but you just have to want it,” she said. “You’ve got to push yourself. You have to say, ‘I’m going to do it.’ And no matter how frustrated you get, you just have to keep going. It’s just the growth mindset, but a lot of people don’t have that.”

Next Generation Medical Academy

Mary Alice Cantu was admiring neighborhood Christmas lights with her children and Freer High School’s curriculum director in 2016 when she heard the school had landed a grant to build a health science pathway. She was the school nurse at the time.

“I said, ‘I really would love to do that,’ ” Cantu said. “(My co-worker) turns around and goes, ‘You’re running it.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m what?’ So I went from the school nurse to this, which was a totally different hat that I wasn’t expecting, but I’ve loved it ever since.”

Cantu began teaching classes at what would become the Next Generation Academy without an education degree. She soon pursued a master’s program to have the credentials under her belt and entered her district’s new teacher academy. 

“I realized it’s one thing to be a teacher and another to be a nurse,” she said. “There’s behavior management, pedagogy — all these terms. I was like, ‘You want me to do a lesson plan?’ It’s like a patient care plan, but it’s for your class.”

The nearest college program and hospital is close to an hour away, so it’s important that the medical academy be equipped as closely to a professional setting as possible, Cantu said. The high school’s home economics kitchen was into a model hospital, complete with a reception desk, patient beds, drug administration carts, IV stands and dummy patients. 

Students wear blue scrubs, clock into class with timecards and poke needles into silicone arms to draw synthetic blood before they practice on each other. There are multiple 7-foot-long touchscreen tables with digital replicas of bodies donated to science. Cantu can peel back layers of the cadavers and simulate health conditions for her anatomy or physiology classes.

Students can earn certifications in phlebotomy, electrocardiogram testing, patient care and medical assistance that can be used in the workplace. The academy got so popular that Freer’s next school nurse was hired as a second educator.

“It’s a good problem to have that we’re going to have so many students with certifications, and I don’t mind it, the numbers are growing, and we’ll just figure it out,” Cantu said. “There’s just so much opportunity for these students, whether they decide to go into nursing or not, they’re going to have the confidence and the people skills to be able to step into any setting and succeed.”

This growing enrollment is a double-edged sword, Gonzalez said. As more students join academies like Next Generation, teachers have to play a game of Tetris with class schedules and schools have to consider hiring more staff in a remote area that’s hard to recruit for. 

Student attendance can also be tricky. Gonzalez said some teachers and coaches value athletics or extracurriculars over their academy programs, and students may miss a class they get only twice a week if their team has to travel for a game or conference. 

The number of educators who were present during the zone’s creation is also dwindling. The partner districts have gone through five superintendents in the past three years together, meaning more people are coming in who are unfamiliar with the model and how it works, Gonzalez said.

A couple of districts have the traditional eight class periods, while the others have block schedules, making it difficult to coordinate transportation between schools. And then there are the students who switch academies or decide to leave a program altogether. The STEM academy has the lowest retention rate, at 86%. Next Generation Medical Academy retains more than 96% of its students.

“It’s crucial that we have ‘kid magnets,’ or teachers who have a relationship with these youngsters,” Gonzalez said. “They keep them in there, right? I’m not going to lie — we lose kids all the time.”

Gonzalez’s own job keeps him working all hours of the day. That dedication earned him a from South by Southwest last year.

“I didn’t realize the magnitude of it,” he said. “It’s pretty neat. You know, I just try to stay the course, try to stay on it. I use the word ‘grinder’ a lot because that’s just the way I was raised.”

Gonzalez said the Rural Schools Innovation Zone allows the remote, small districts of south Texas to remain operating and, in turn, keep their communities alive. 

Each town can still gather under bright stadium lights on autumn Fridays to cheer on its football team. Students can continue to walk to their neighborhood school. And families stay because their children can still get big-city opportunities, he said.

“Why do kids pick schools? Usually for programs. They don’t go because they have the best English teacher, right?” he said. “They have the best nursing program, the best baseball program, the best football program. They go for programming and then the ‘kid magnet’ teachers running the program. So if I can allow you to be involved with the best program in the world and you don’t have to leave your school district, it’s a no-brainer. That’s what we did.”

Steel Dynamics Inc., a local manufacturing company, wanted student help recruiting young women and candidates from different ethnic groups that don’t often seek manufacturing jobs.

“They’re kind of expanding their outreach,” Gebhard told a classroom of juniors and seniors, all deciding between eight business and non-profit project challenges to spend the spring working on. They’re kind of rebuilding recruitment from the ground up…so your job is to create some marketing around that.”

But Gebhard wanted students to consider another level, a more personal one, as they made their choice, telling them to carefully pick the project that fits a passion or teaches them a key skill toward a career goal. 

That’s the overall mission of Amp Lab, after all. Still in its infancy, the school launched in 2022 with a very different goal from a typical high school: 

Developing an entrepreneurial mindset that applies across multiple careers or businesses, especially companies they might start themselves. 

Though many high schools boast of creating good work opportunities for students, few have overcome the schedule and transportation hurdles to place students in internships, even when companies want them. Only about 6% of high school students nationally have the chance to do an internship or apprenticeship, the best available estimates show.

Amp Lab’s model is built around giving every student the opportunity to work with local businesses, going beyond even some of the more ambitious schools in the country. The school also focuses on building mastery of personal skills — including insight, persistence, problem solving, turning problems into opportunities — alongside broad business skills such as financial management, legal analysis, marketing, sales and operations.

“Always think of it this way: How does this matter to you 10 years from now?” Gebhard told students. “Like, what is this going to do for you 10 years from now?”

Amp Lab doesn’t look or feel like a typical high school. For starters, its full name is Amp Lab at , referring to the massive 38-acre factory complex that was a General Electric motor plant for decades before being renovated and re-opening as home to the school and several area businesses in 2022.

Open to high school juniors and seniors from across the Ft. Wayne Community Schools — half of its 400 students coming in the morning and half coming in the afternoon — Amp Lab is officially a career technical school. But it doesn’t teach the auto repair, construction and plumbing skills offered at typical career training centers.

Its only focus is entrepreneurship. 

“In most traditional CTE centers, you’ve got a bunch of individual programs that are all separate,” said founding Principal Riley Johnson. “What we chose to do here was kind of flip that equation. Every kid that comes to Amp Lab is in the entrepreneurship pathway, and their connection to industry skill is across all potential career clusters.”

“We look at entrepreneurship as a mindset and a tool set that a kid can apply, whether they’re in banking or veterinary science or cosmetology.”

Work-based learning is a key part of the model. so Amp Lab has students engage with businesses in the spring and in the fall using three different methods:

• Every junior takes on at least one group project for a local business, such as the one Gebhart described, that they do mostly at school with some visits to the company.
• Students can choose to start their own business by developing a product and a marketing plan. They either make it themselves or hire a company to make it, and then sell it.
• About half do a traditional internship working at a local company about 10 to 15 hours a week.

“Our goal is that, in some form or fashion, every kid gets an external experience, but we’re not there yet,” Riley said.

Regardless of the approach, teachers evaluate how student skills are growing and weigh the growth of students’ mindset as much as teachers in traditional high schools weigh progress in math and English. That progress is all reported to students, parents and colleges on an innovative but still-developing supplement to traditional report cards called a Mastery Learning Record that shows how well students are moving toward mastering a skill, rather than just giving them an A-F grade at the end of a quarter.

Amp Lab is one of 40 schools nationally testing the Learning Record as it is refined.

How the Learning Record works with those schools will help inform an effort by six states and others to test, measure and report student progress on so-called “durable skills,” the first being collaboration, communication and critical thinking. Amp Lab is just one data point as new report cards are developed, but the school was recently highlighted by the non-profit XQ Institute for embracing an innovation it wants high schools to adopt nationally.

“These competencies aren’t easy to convey in a conventional report card or transcript,” XQ wrote in its recent report, The Future Is High School, calling the learning record “far more detailed and nuanced.”

“The Amp Lab record documents exactly which competencies students have mastered, such as intuitive agility, collaborative intelligence, and — yes — entrepreneurial spirit,” XQ added.

The work-based “challenges,” as the school calls them, can look different for every student.

When Amp Lab launched, the school had to seek out businesses willing to work with students. on these projects. Now, it has more applications than it needs, and can tell businesses to refine them and apply again later. The goal isn’t just to invent a project for students, but have them work on a problem the business is truly facing and have the work matter.

This spring, students are picking from eight businesses and non-profits, including: the Steel Dynamics project; designing and testing a part for another manufacturer; helping a local nonprofit spread messages aimed at improving maternal health; designing a plan to encourage vegetable gardening in a low-income neighborhood; or designing and creating murals to promote a historic arena in the city.

Sometimes the projects line up well with student interests. Senior Tyreece Menifee Jr., who wants to be both a barber and fashion designer, worked last year designing costumes and marketing for a production of A Christmas Carol by the Ft. Wayne Youth Theater.

He then created his own mini business by designing a hooded sweatshirt — picking the fabric, background design and the lettering for it — and ordering a batch of 20 from a Pakistani company online. He’s now selling the hoodies for $90 on a website he created.

“I’ve learned a lot of stuff here, just being here,” Menifee said. “I feel like the environment changes your mindset. You get focused on what you need to do.”

Senior Ruby Campbell-Carpenter used her interest in animals to create a pet food business called Tailored Bites. She talked with a veterinary clinic, the county health department and a meat company that school staff helped her connect with, to create a chicken based dog food — one that passed taste tests of several dogs — that she and a classmate then sold at a farmers market.

She also interned at a veterinary office through the school last spring, which turned into a part-time job last summer and helped confirm her plans to become a vet.

“Amp Lab is very growth oriented,” she said. “They grade you based on if you’re growing, if you’re learning,” she said. “Amp Lab also has so many connections, compared to your typical high school. They honestly have connections to pretty much every business.”

Sometimes the school finds internships with businesses or nonprofits right at the Electric Works complex, letting students work without needing transportation from the school.

Those include a health clinic, an advertising agency, a manufacturer of steel decking and the nonprofit REFINERY — Robotics Education, Fabrication and Innovation Nexus: Entrepreneurship for Rising Youth — a giant open maker space that robotics teams from local high schools can use as a workshop. It also serves as a central bulk purchaser for those teams.

Interns like senior Alfy Krider, a member of the robotics team of Northrop High School where she goes to class every morning, spends her afternoon Amp Lab time organizing equipment and the space for teams to test their robots, even 3D printing parts or ordering parts for them. 

She doesn’t mind helping competitors as his job.

“Robotics really promotes gracious professionalism, which is helping out other teams as much as you can,” she said. “It’s just so much of a culture of helping everyone out, because when you need help, they’ll be there for you.”

Along with letting Krider immerse herself in the business of robotics, the company benefits hugely from student help.

“They’ve been instrumental in getting everything, honestly, built up,” said Briana Smedberg, vice president of BioNanomics, the nonprofit in charge of the space, before rattling off a list of jobs interns accomplished. “The students built all of this”

Johnson said internships like this — that let students interact with others and fill a professional role — matter as much as any class or credential.

“The resume portfolio is as powerful of a tool as anything,” he said. “We found having something like this as a door opener and as a networking tool is just as valuable as as any other currency.”

Their preparation and evaluation focuses disproportionately on compliance and core academics, not on whether students graduate ready for what comes next. The result is a system that sidelines the very leaders who could drive change. School-level leaders should be the chief architects of high school redesign and high-quality pathways, connecting what students learn in classrooms with the real skills, experiences and credentials they’ll need after graduation. 

Decades of research confirm what common sense suggests: Effective principals and assistant principals drive student success. The has shown that principals are second only to teachers on their impact on student learning. More recent from the UChicago Consortium on School Research finds strong school leaders affect not only high school achievement but also students’ college enrollment and persistence.   

These findings are especially relevant now as educators and policymakers across the country rethink the purpose and structure of high school.  New efforts from the, the , and aim to align education with the demands of today’s economy — emphasizing skills, credentials, and experiences that prepare students for college, career and adult life. But these initiatives will falter if the people responsible for running high schools aren’t prepared.

Despite the key role they play,  principals rarely receive the training or guidance needed to lead this kind of redesign and must simultaneously manage competing district priorities.  of district leaders consistently rank math and reading scores, chronic absenteeism and teacher recruitment as top concerns, while expanding access to career and technical education or dual enrollment programs ranks near the bottom. 

The message seems to be that academic recovery matters, but preparing students for life after graduation is optional. As a result, high school redesign efforts often sit on the margins, disconnected from the day-to-day work of teaching and learning. Principals, pressed by urgent academic demands, lack the time, resources, or cover  to connect those priorities with students’ long-term goals.

If states and districts want high school redesign to succeed, they need to put principals and assistant principals at the center of those efforts. This means aligning preparation, expectations, and accountability around the idea that postsecondary readiness is not a separate responsibility but a core part of the work of principals and assistant principals. 

First, it’s important to break down the silos separating high school redesign from broader school improvement priorities.  Postsecondary readiness is school improvement. Focusing on instructional achievement isn’t mutually exclusive with improving career-connected learning or access to accelerated coursework.  

Matt Gandal, President of Education Strategy Group recently , “If we want to change the trajectory of student performance in high school, we have to do more to inspire them — including showing them the connection between what they’re learning in school and their future goals.” Vermont has developed a framework that shows how this is possible by including mechanisms to help principals and assistant principals plan for increasing access to advanced coursework. 

Second, pathway planning, counselor supervision and high-quality advising need to be part of state school leader standards.  Across states, school leadership standards rarely reference or outline the specific knowledge and skills that secondary principals should develop in order to effectively lead students to postsecondary and workforce success. When these outcomes become part of what schools are held accountable for, principals can lead them with purpose.  Illinois’ offers a strong model by explicitly including college and career readiness as a leadership competency.  

Third, and most critical, the initial preparation, ongoing coaching and peer networks for school leaders should all emphasize high school redesign and pathways.  Skim most state certification for principals and you’ll see mandatory classes on finance, instruction, child psychology and special education law. Licensure and preparation programs should treat college and career readiness as fundamental, not elective. Principals need to learn how to align schedules, curricula and partnerships to help every student graduate with a plan and the experiences to pursue it. They deserve ongoing coaching and peer networks that reinforce this vision.

Promising models exist and show a way forward. For example, since 2021-2022, the has partnered with over 300 school and district leaders through a multi-year coaching and professional learning partnership focused on the conditions that enable postsecondary readiness. This partnership is guided by an overarching research-based for leadership development oriented toward long-term student success. 

Reframing the principal’s job around students’ long-term readiness offers high returns. When principals connect academic learning with meaningful experiences such as dual enrollment, apprenticeships or credential programs, students are more likely to graduate with confidence and purpose. They see school as relevant to their future, not as a disconnected series of requirements. The cost of these changes is modest compared with their potential benefits. The estimates that comprehensive leadership development  can be implemented for about $42 per student. This cost is far less than the price of failed reforms. 

What’s missing is not evidence or funding but alignment: Policymakers and system leaders must decide that empowering principals to lead this work is worth the investment. High school redesign will not succeed through frameworks or pilot programs alone. It will succeed when principals have the preparation, authority and support to make postsecondary readiness central to their mission — and when states and districts create the conditions for them to do so.

Disclosure: ����Ӱ�� receive financial support from the Wallace Foundation.

 In my home state of , 30% of teachers overall and 37% of nonwhite teachers leave public education within five years, and the numbers are . It’s a big reason why teacher shortages remain such a persistent challenge, particularly in and STEM classrooms and in .

These trends are not new, but the over the last 10 years makes addressing them more urgent than ever. The administration’s recent actions have only made that work harder.

Even in this fractured political environment, though, there’s continued bipartisan support for career pathway programs that can address these issues by helping young people develop skills that lead to good-paying jobs. Classrooms are filled with talented young people with the potential to become great teachers who understand, through firsthand experience, their communities’ needs. Instead of making them wait until after college to choose teaching as a career, the path to the profession should start in high school.

Efforts to connect high school and educator preparation already exist, through organizations like and the . But school, district and state leaders should seize the opportunity to expand these models much more widely. Here are the first three steps that could make it happen.

First, states should use federal policy and strategic funding to address low starting pay and the high cost of training, which are both barriers for aspiring teachers. For example, Delaware has found innovative ways to boost starting salaries for both and , in which they spend a year in classrooms observing and learning from veterans. Districts in Delaware have combined state and local funding to increase stipends for teacher residents from $20,000 to over $40,000 in some districts by using to shift unused budget allocations into funding for these programs.

Additionally, the state recently introduced new , which help districts or charter schools establish their own teacher pathways. It also teaching as an apprenticeship to help lower the upfront costs of certification by placing aspiring teachers in paid positions in schools while they’re completing their training.

Second, districts should look to career and technical (CTE) programs as pathways into teaching. CTE leaders, teacher recruitment teams and district career counselors must work together, meeting regularly to identify high school students with potential to become strong teachers and encouraging them to take advantage of education pathways programs. They should also monitor the progress of pathways participants, troubleshoot any issues and brainstorm ways to make programming more relevant and meaningful. These can include offering hands-on learning opportunities, such as tutoring and job-shadowing educators at neighboring schools, that allow students to earn college credit. This, in turn, would help colleges recruit high-achieving students into their education programs to take the next step toward teacher certification.

Third, schools must recruit passionate educators to support aspiring teachers of all backgrounds. Students need teachers who reflect their identities and experiences. It’s not news that the U.S. has a teacher diversity problem — nationally, only of educators at public schools are people of color. But districts and states can work toward staffing high school teacher pathway courses with educators who can build culturally affirming environments that inspire the next generation of teachers. 

Through its year-long high school CTE course for students interested in teaching, has shown that this strategy works. The program, which includes high school students in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Michigan, provides a culturally affirming curriculum and pairs students with passionate educators as mentors. Students who completed the program showed an in teaching — and, specifically, in teaching Black students.

Schools can nurture the next generation of education changemakers — teachers who will reflect the diversity of their future students — even before they graduate.

If education leaders and policymakers are serious about solving the teacher recruitment, retention and diversity challenges that have bedeviled schools for generations, they must move beyond isolated initiatives and build a cohesive, systemic approach that starts in high school. By fully integrating teacher pathway programs into high schools, they can ignite a passion for teaching among students, create seamless transitions into the profession and ensure more classrooms are led by educators who reflect and understand the communities they serve. The pieces of the puzzle already exist — education leaders just need the collective will to see the big picture and put them together.

When tragedy struck, we suddenly needed something more: flexibility and understanding. We found that at an alternative hybrid school.

Our mother had Type 1 diabetes during our whole life, but in our junior year of high school it got worse. She needed around-the-clock help, including support from us. We tried to make it work for the first two years, but it just got to be too much. Plus our minds were in a different place. We weren’t interested in dances and socializing. We were always thinking about our mother. We were dealing with bigger problems than what to wear to school. We looked into online programs for school and picked (CCAA), a hybrid alternative school that was available through our school district.

We were able to set our own pace and had the flexibility to meet our school obligations while focusing on taking care of our mother. We were able to make our own decisions about our school/life balance. Our teachers at CCAA were understanding when we had to leave school early, and they offered the support we needed to get us through the times when our mother’s illness meant we had to put school on the back burner.

We had to be mature. We didn’t go to school to play and hang out, but to get work done. We were responsible for our own success and finally had a structure that allowed us to manage that responsibility on our own terms, along with plenty of personal support. Wendy Thompson, former district director at CCAA, checked on us every week. If there was something we couldn’t do, she would help us or find someone who could. Just her constant presence and caring about our schoolwork and our personal well-being filled a void and helped us not feel so adrift. She helped us fill out college applications and sorted out a plan for how we would start a career and get the training we needed. 

Miss Wendy also helped us pursue our college plans once we graduated. After our mom died, we were at a loss for how to move on to that next chapter; the idea of working and running a home and tackling college at the same time was just too much. Miss Wendy called us every day for a week and asked “What’s wrong? What can we do to make this easier?” She helped us realize we could still pursue our dreams in the medical field.

Today we’re both medical assistants. We went through a training program at Northwest Career College and earned medical assistant licenses and phlebotomy certifications in nine months. Now we are pursuing bachelors of science degrees in nursing through a different hybrid program at Grand Canyon University. All the prerequisite courses are offered online and then students complete their clinical work at the school’s hospital in Henderson, Nevada.

We wish more high school students knew that there are alternatives to traditional high school. A hybrid school like what we did in high school and now in college is a great option. There are some young people who need the social interaction an in-person environment offers, but there are also a lot of us who face challenges or who just want something different.

It takes a lot of strength and drive to persevere through challenges, and we were fortunate to have each other to lean on as well as lots of adults who helped us along the way. We needed each other to push us forward, and we needed supportive adults who trusted us enough to follow our own school pathway on our own terms. 

We have benefitted so much from an alternative pathway through school to a career that we’ve aspired to for years. We want to make sure other students are aware of alternatives that will allow them to focus on their families while meeting their own expectations, so they can achieve their dreams no matter what happens, too.

Newark Public Schools will pay over $300 million over 30 years for its new trade high school — but after many delays, the gym and auditorium may not be finished when it opens this fall.

The Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design is expected to welcome students in September, per an amended lease agreement that extended the deal from 20 to 30 years and was approved by the district’s Board of Education last month. But the deadline for the developer to finish those parts of the school isn’t until the middle of 2026.

The district also has the option to purchase the building for $1,000 at the end of the 30-year lease, according to the revised agreement obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request.

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The amended lease agreement comes after the developer of the property and Summit Assets CEO Albert Nigri would be finished by the start of the upcoming school year.

When the lease for the new trade high school was first signed by the district in 2021, NPS agreed to a $160 million, 20-year lease. The following year, Superintendent Roger León in the city’s East Ward at an invite-only groundbreaking ceremony. He touted the school — the first of its kind in the district — as an opportunity for students to fast-track their technical careers and earn a contract to work with the district.

It was originally scheduled to open in the fall of 2022. But issued by the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development over wage complaints and changes in contractors have delayed the project.

The district’s communications director Paul Brubaker did not respond to questions from Chalkbeat about the project’s setbacks, how the district plans to pay the lease for the school, or its reasoning for extending the lease agreement. Nigri did not respond to calls seeking comment.

The Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design is set to focus on three trades — plumbing, electricity, and HVAC — and allow students to study architecture and interior design. The curriculum will also give students a high school diploma and a license for trade work, district officials have previously said.

The new school is housed at the former St. James Hospital building that has stood vacant for years in the middle of the city’s Ironbound neighborhood. When it opens, the school will enroll 240 ninth grade students and add a grade level each year. Payments to Nigri, the property’s landlord and developer, are set to begin when the school opens this fall.

New high school delayed amid pay complaints

The latest version of the amended lease, approved by the school board in May, includes two new deadlines for the completion of the school.

By Aug. 1, 2025, the base of the school building must be completed, which includes new walls, roofs, and windows, elevators, restrooms, a courtyard, and landscaping. By June 1, 2026, the newly constructed gym and auditorium must be completed and the building must be finished, according to the lease amendment.

Those deadlines are later than those in approved by NPS in August 2024, which were for the base of the school building to be completed by Jan. 9, the new gym and auditorium to be finished by July 30, and the building to be completed by Sept. 1.

The amended lease also extends the deal from 20 to 30 years and bumps up the total lease to $295,979,990 over 30 years. The district must also pay a total of $20 million in additional payments to Nigri between year two and year six and year 26 and year 30 of the lease.

Union workers at the high school’s construction site also encountered poor working conditions that were making their jobs unsafe and many were being paid late or in cash. That resulted in the union filing wage complaints with the state.

In September 2022, the New Jersey Department of Labor issued stop-work orders to Summit Assets as well as the former general contractor and an ex-subcontractor. That order halted work on the site for months before Nigri hired a new contractor and subcontractor.

Days later, dozens of union workers demanding that León intervene after they were forced out of work and owed pay. León addressed laborers’ complaints and reiterated the district’s plan to open the school in September 2023.

, the Department of Labor issued a second stop-work order on the site and to the new contractors and subcontractors of the project. Although the work subsequently resumed, district leaders have not addressed the project’s delays or issues related to worker pay.

Instead, the district began to advertise a fall 2025 opening date, and this spring, it opened up enrollment to the school. Brubaker did not respond to a request for comment about the district’s contingency plan if the landlord fails to deliver part of the building by Aug. 1.

State remains responsible for new school construction in Newark

on the project, former assistant school business administrator Jason Ballard said that leasing a high school building is more affordable than building a new high school, which he said costs an average of $134 million. That’s less than half of what the district will pay on its lease for the new trade school, based on construction plans in other New Jersey cities.

The Schools Development Authority is the state agency responsible for paying construction projects in Newark and 30 other low-income school districts. According to its , the cost per square foot for a high school project was $369 at that time.

The agency’s largest and most expensive construction project is , which opened its doors last fall and cost $284 million to add room for nearly 3,300 students.

Over the years, the agency has promised the district it would pay for school repairs and provide new buildings. But despite efforts to address these challenges, including the allocation of $18 million in state funding for building upgrades over the last three fiscal years, the district estimates that it would need more than $2 billion to repair and update all schools.

The Newark school district has identified 33 out of its 64 total schools that need replacing and dozens more that need renovations. The state agency last summer promised to replace , but the deal still leaves out 20 schools that need replacements. The state agency also said it would spend a new University High School and relocate Hawthorne Avenue Elementary School, but the plan is still in its early stages.

In 2023, the Schools Development Authority purchased the former University Heights Charter School building and transferred it to the district to fulfill its promise to provide a new elementary school, now known as the

This story was originally by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, and CareerWise USA, which runs apprenticeship programs for high-schoolers in five states, announced the Education and Apprenticeship Accelerator late last month.

The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades and the governors of California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have also joined the coalition.

Its goal is to improve and expand Career Technical Education (CTE) both in high schools and community colleges and create more student internships and apprenticeships where students are paid to both work and go to school. Only about 5% of high school students nationally have a chance at an internship or apprenticeship, estimates available show.

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the union sees a need to shift away from the “college for all” mindset of the last 20 years, and be a part of giving students other ways to prepare for work and life.

“Look how many kids we’ve seen in schools that feel totally at sea,” said Weingarten, who also called for changes in a May 6 New York Times opinion piece

Instead of working independently and sometimes at cross-purposes, which has kept the number of opportunities for students low, CareerWise founder Noel Ginsburg said the new partnership will help government, business and schools work together in support of training efforts.

Challenges include aligning school and work schedules, finding transportation for students between work and school, giving students course credit for work-based learning and making sure students are working in fields that are hiring.

Both Ginsburg and Weingarten said the states can serve as laboratories to find the right formulas to succeed, then the partnership can promote them and find a common plan that covers all states.

“This is intended to truly create…examples for the country in multiple states that can show how this matters,” Ginsburg said. 

“We’ll bring resources to it, both financial, technical and consulting, to enable these states to accelerate faster, to make this happen,” Ginsburg said. “(We’ll) bring these systems together so that our gears aren’t grinding, that they are connected and, in fact, we’re moving forward.”

Governors of the participating states echoed the call for improving training opportunities for students.

Apprenticeships are common in Europe, with more than half of students in countries like Switzerland participating. Apprenticeships In the U.S. usually start after high school, instead of the equivalent of junior year in Europe, and have traditionally been in construction trades.

But apprenticeships across the country have been growing in recent years and in other fields, particularly health care, information technology and advanced manufacturing. New U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has also , and has called for more CTE, apprenticeships and tuition assistance for career training.

President Donald Trump signed an. But the administration also shut down a Department of Labor advisory panel on apprenticeships that Ginsburg had a major role on and , a training program for 25,000 young people a year, a decision that is being

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Today’s education system fails to adequately prepare many students for college and the workforce. One found less than a quarter of high school graduates believe their schooling prepared them for life after graduation. Meanwhile, employers want candidates with “21^st Century Skills,” but are coming up short.

In recent years, however, there has been a promising shift as many states re-evaluate how to prepare students for the world. and hundreds of districts have created “Portraits of a Graduate” outlining the skills students should have by graduation such as communication, problem-solving, critical thinking and collaboration. 

Meanwhile, the landscape of K-12 assessments is also shifting. Last year when New York to eliminate the requirement that students pass the Regents Exam in order to graduate, it a of states that have ended reliance solely on exit exams as a condition of graduation. Instead, states are increasingly embracing measures such as which measure both what students know and whether they can apply that knowledge. These students demonstrate their skills through completing a project or performing a certain activity, which can include. essays, portfolios or research papers.

With the right support, these changes can effectively prepare students for the workforce of tomorrow. We have seen this happen in schools that have taken a project-based learning approach to instruction and assessment.

For instance, the rural Adair County School District in Kentucky launched an initiative to help students build skills outlined in the state’s portrait of a graduate and create a “culture of inquiry.” In one project, high school English and business classes, led by teachers Amy South and JR Thompson, worked together to research local industries and community businesses, interview business owners, analyze marketing strategies and develop comprehensive plans for promoting the community and its local businesses to outsiders.

As part of the process, students were introduced to the concept of a “strong hook” to capture interest and then divided into two teams. Each team worked collaboratively to propose a value proposition and refine their marketing strategies. They were then required to pitch their ideas and plans, ultimately narrowing down their focus to two distinct community projects. They presented their final pitches live to a jury, which selected one — a Marketing Day Vendor Fair — to be implemented in the community. The project culminated in students hosting an event at the high school showcasing local businesses

The Thomas Edison CTE High School in Queens, New York, is currently a for the New York State Department of Education, training other schools to develop performance-based assessments. It uses a project-based learning model in which students engage in real-world and personally meaningful projects. It developed a framework and “essential skills” rubric that assesses both how well students know the content and whether they can demonstrate essential skills of communication, collaboration, feedback and reflection, design thinking and professionalism. 

These are just two examples of schools that are leading the way in making sure students are prepared for the world by the time they graduate. We need more stories like this. Instead of focusing on cuts to education, we need to continue the momentum happening in New York and elsewhere by supporting and growing these innovative programs.

We call on parents, caregivers, students, schools, districts, boards of education, policy makers and government agencies to focus on these key areas to ensure the momentum continues and the changes last

• Professional development and capacity building: Institutions must ensure all teachers have ample time for professional development around performance-based curriculum and assessments as well as ongoing professional support. Buy-in at all levels is required in order to strengthen the system and build the capacity needed to make the shift toward building and measuring real-world skills.
  
• Funding: Re-defining student success — and how to assess it — will require investment. State leaders must ensure that there is funding to provide the staffing, training, curriculum and resources to support implementing performance-based assessments.
  
• Stakeholder alignment: K-12 schools, local industries and higher education institutions must be aligned on which skills are important for career and college readiness. 
  
• Communications: Some students may resist performance-based assessments because they have learned how to navigate the current system and do well on tests. Communicating effectively to students and families will help to shift mindsets and make the process smoother.  

Change is slow, but worth it. It will take persistence. There must be a willingness from all involved to hold the line and know it might take 10 years for this new way of assessing student learning to fully take hold.

We are experiencing a rare opportunity to change education and improve student success. This work must be intentional, evidence-based, and supported at all levels. We implore education leaders, policy makers, schools, districts and communities to lay the groundwork now to ensure students have a successful future and can respond to the “letter to high school and college graduates” with a resounding “Yes.”  

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

When 18-year-old Edgar Brito thinks about what he’ll do in the future, mechanical engineering is high on the list.

The senior at Washington state’s Toppenish High School first considered the career after he joined a STEM group in middle school. In a ninth grade class, he researched the earning potential for a STEM degree (“so much more money”) and the demand for mechanical engineers (“exploding”).

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So Brito took some engineering classes at his high school, became president of his state’s Technology Student Association, and is starting at the University of Washington this fall on a pre-science track.

Brito’s experience is what state education leaders hoped for when they replaced the high school exit exam with . When he graduates in June, Brito will have completed several diploma pathways, including ones aimed at preparing for college and building career skills.

But his experience isn’t necessarily typical. He has friends who have no idea what pathway they’re on — or if they’re on one at all. The requirements could be clearer and advisers could spend more time talking about them with students, he said.

“Making sure that we know exactly what our pathway is and what it means to be on a pathway would have definitely helped out a lot more students,” Brito said.

Five years after Washington rolled out its pathways, they appear to have helped more students who aren’t college-bound to graduate, . But the system has also created new issues and replicated some old ones.

For the Class of 2023 — the most recent year with available data — around 1 in 5 seniors didn’t have a pathway. That meant they weren’t on track to graduate within four years and at risk of dropping out. Some students relied on pandemic-era waivers that don’t exist anymore. That’s similar to the share of students who didn’t graduate on time in 2019, the final year of the exit exam.

Asian and white students are much more likely to complete one of the math and English pathways, considered the college-prep route, while Native students, English learners, and students with disabilities are more likely to have no graduation pathway.

“The implementation of graduation pathways has reinforced that the student groups who are the furthest from educational justice are completing the requirement at lower rates,” .

Across the state, students don’t have equal access to the pathways. Many schools, especially smaller and rural ones, struggle to offer more than a handful of career and technical education classes. Some career pathways train students for low-paying jobs with little opportunity for advancement. Some students get funneled to the military pathway, despite having no aspirations to serve, because the aptitude test is easier to pass. Many teens, like Brito’s friends, find the pathways confusing.

Washington is not alone. . And some, at their pathways. Many have struggled to address the same big questions, including what exactly high school is for, and what students should need to do to earn a diploma.

Now the state board of education is .

Piling on more ways for students to graduate is not the answer, said Brian Jeffries, the policy director at the Partnership for Learning, an education foundation affiliated with the Washington Roundtable, which is made up of executives from across the state.

“Let’s better prepare our students to meet the pathways, [rather] than keep creating a smorgasbord or a cafeteria of options, which too often turn into trapdoors,” said Jeffries, who sits on the . Until disadvantaged kids have access to better instruction and more support, he said, “we’re going to keep spinning this wheel.”

The path to 100 high school graduation pathways

Back in the early 2000s, many states raised the bar to graduate from high school with the hope it would get more kids to college. As a result, by 2012,, including Washington state.

But as student debt soared and some questioned the value of higher education, schools abandoned that college-for-all mentality. Critics of exit exams argued that they blocked too many disadvantaged students from graduating.

In Washington state’s final year of the exit exam, around 1 in 10 high school seniors didn’t pass the English language arts portion, and 1 in 5 didn’t pass the math test, . The law that nixed the exit exam had broad support from the Washington teachers union, state education officials, and parents. Lawmakers passed it unanimously.

Just six states require an exit exam now, with and dropping their tests this school year.

But absent an exit exam, on what students should have to do to prove they’re ready to graduate.

Nationwide, there are now more than 100 ways to graduate from high school, according to a, a K-12 consulting firm. The myriad options provide flexibility, but “also contribute to the lack of clarity about what it means to earn a diploma,” the report found.

When the nation’s main K-12 education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed 10 years ago, it tasked schools with getting students ready for college and career. But many states and schools are still trying to figure out how to do the career part well.

“Part of the challenge, frankly, is that schools are going through a bit of a post-high-stakes-test-based accountability identity crisis,” said Shaun Dougherty, a professor of education and policy at Boston College.

Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, says that’s partly because for all the talk about changing high schools, graduation policies are still fairly restrictive. One reason Washington is revisiting its policies now is because some educators worry fills up students’ schedules, leaving little time for apprenticeships and other hands-on learning.

Many kids are still “sleepwalking through six or seven class periods a day, mostly through college-prep courses,” Petrilli said, with “maybe a few career-tech electives on the side.”

“We haven’t really unleashed high schools to do things very differently,” Petrilli said. “If we actually think that career tech is valuable, if we think that college-for-all was a mistake, then we need to be willing to act on it.”

Diploma pathways can bolster teens’ interest in school

What’s happening in the Toppenish School District illustrates the potential of the pathways model.

The district, which serves around 3,700 students in south-central Washington, , including in growing industries, like health care and agriculture. The career-oriented pathway has helped increase some students’ interest in school.

“It is very hands-on, and so it’s definitely more engaging,” said Monica Saldivar, Toppenish’s director of career and technical education. The old one-size-fits-all approach had “a negative impact for our students with diverse learning needs, academic challenges, and also language barriers.”

Just before the state overhauled its graduation requirements, over 81% of Toppenish students graduated within four years. Now over 89% do.

The improvements have been especially pronounced for English learners and Native students, many of whom live on the Yakama Nation. Since the state introduced pathways, Native student graduation rates have risen from 67% to 88%.

Since pathways launched, the district has added several career-technical education courses, including advanced welding and classes that prepare students to work as medical transcriptionists or home health care aides. That can require some careful career counseling with students, as those jobs are in high demand but don’t pay well unless students get additional training or schooling and move up the career ladder.

Still, the expanded offerings have helped some students tailor their post-high school plans.

Frances Tilley, a Toppenish senior who’s headed to Gonzaga University in the fall, will graduate in June after completing both college-prep and career-oriented pathways.

The 18-year-old took two of the new sports medicine classes and liked learning about what to do if you have a concussion. (Don’t try to stay awake. “We learned that’s not true,” Tilley said.)

She followed that up with another health care class that touched on different disciplines. She gravitated toward psychology and now plans to get a master’s in counseling and become a mental health worker.

Pathways can also help schools expose students to career options earlier.

Three years ago, Toppenish started offering middle schoolers two-week labs to test drive careers such as marketing, nursing, or culinary arts. By the end of eighth grade, they’ve learned about 10 different careers. Now school counselors use students’ interests to help plot their high school schedules.

Kaylee Celestino, 16, had long considered becoming a teacher. The Toppenish sophomore often gets “education” as an answer when she takes career quizzes. But the career-exploration labs also piqued her interest in science, and now she could also envision becoming a pediatric nurse. So her course schedule reflects that with advanced biology and college-level chemistry.

“I just want to help people out,” she said, “like my teachers have helped out me.”

Staffing, standards, data gaps make pathways challenging

Staffing career and technical classes is one of the biggest hurdles to doing pathways well.

Washington makes it easier than other states for . But many schools still struggle to attract and retain teachers for attractive fields like health services and welding when the private sector beckons.

“These are lucrative fields,” said Dougherty, who has researched career education programs in several states, including Washington. “It’s hard to convince people to give up that salary to become full-time educators.”

That creates extra work for schools. Saldivar, for example, meets regularly with regional employers to learn about their workforce needs. That helps inform whether Toppenish should drop or add certain classes, and which teachers to recruit. Saldivar is constantly networking and following up on “so and so may know someone” tips.

Figuring out how to hold all students to a high standard when they are meeting different criteria to graduate is a challenge, too. Some worry Washington’s pathways are too flexible.

The state rolled out a new pathway this year that allows students to graduate by completing a project, work-related experience, or community service. . But students don’t have to work with a teacher at their school, and if they choose to work with an outside mentor, .

“Where are they finding these people?” said Jeffries of the Partnership for Learning. “Is their opinion an expert opinion that we could trust, or is this based on vibes?”

Experts say it’s also important for students to understand what their likely earnings and other outcomes will be depending on which career pathway they follow.

“We should not be talking about CTE in a very generic way,” said Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington who has researched career and technical education teacher preparation in the state. “What the concentration is matters.”

But Washington state doesn’t yet know how students’ outcomes may vary depending on which career and technical education concentration they chose, Katie Hannig, a spokesperson for Washington’s state education agency, wrote in an email. .

The state also doesn’t yet know whether the pathway, or pathways, students completed were connected to their post-high school plan, which they must create to graduate. That hasn’t assuaged concerns that students are completing pathways disconnected from their college and career goals.

The state expects to get that data in the future, Hannig wrote. Analyzing how diploma pathways affect graduation trends and postsecondary outcomes could help schools target resources and support.

“Any new policy is a work in progress, but the fundamental core value of this policy is preparing students for their next step after high school graduation,” Hannig wrote. “Washington is proud to be one of those states that have established and continue to refine those pathways.”

For now, districts like Toppenish are scrambling to coordinate weekly college presentations, field trips to work sites, and military recruiter visits — “a little of everything,” Saldivar said — to hedge their bets.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

But nowadays , said Christina Sanchez, a school and college counselor at in the San Fernando Valley.

Sanchez, who has worked as a counselor for more than two decades, has put in the time in schools to know what students think and feel about their possible future career paths. 

She said career and technical education is amongst today’s high school seniors, and, as far as she can tell, even are feeling the shift. 

But from her perch at Triumph Charter High, a , Title I school, Sanchez also said students should be mindful of the path they choose, whether it be college or the workforce. 

“If they are going to college just because somebody told them it’s best, that usually doesn’t work out,” she said. “But I also think they should consider the benefits of a college education.” 

Read on as Sanchez weighs in on why the CTE is ascendent, what colleges are doing to adjust, and whether this shift is good for students. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

University enrollment has declined over the past decade, and vocational programs are rising in that same timeframe. Have you noticed this trend and what do you attribute this to? 

We still have students going to college, but yes it is definitely a declining number. 

I would say there’s more interest in a quick payout. They see that more in trades. So, students are gravitating toward trade school where they can focus on a career and get out sooner. They feel they can make money quicker, and just as much, if not more, as with a college education. 

They’re equating education with money more, especially since the pandemic. Yes, there are obvious connections between those. But, it’s not the only factor, and it really depends what field you go into. 

What are universities doing to avoid a decline in enrollment?

There are still schools like UCLA and UC Berkeley who are very selective. UCLA is not begging anybody to apply.

I’ve definitely seen private colleges sending marketing emails more to get students to apply, and even waiving application fees. Sometimes they say ‘you don’t even need to do the extra work, just send us a transcript.’ Public universities are extending deadlines often as well. 

Community colleges are also increasing and promoting their trade programs more than ever. That’s becoming a focus for them because they’re trying to compete. 

Are there more downsides to a college degree now than in years past, and are students more pessimistic about going to college?

There’s definitely a resistance to taking out student loans. It doesn’t help that parents will often highlight cautionary tales, like a niece or nephew who went to college and is now working retail. 

I haven’t noticed any increases in unemployment rates or underemployment rates. Those are specific instances, not really a trend. When we do hear back from our alumni who went to college, they are almost always working on something related to their degree. I rarely have a student come back and say they haven’t been able to get a job. 

Why are trade careers becoming more interesting to students? 

There are always trending careers, but they ebb and flow. Today, social media has more of an impact on what careers students see. Sometimes I talk to students and ask, ‘How did you even know about that?’ and they say they saw it on social media. 

People highlight their career paths, and students see the best of it. They see what the person chooses to show. Just like it is with people’s private lives, you may not see the bad days or the bad sides of it. They’re not highlighting the negatives. I definitely see that influencing students when it comes to career paths, especially in the last five years. 

What advice would you give to a student choosing between a trade school and a university in this current job climate? 

I think everybody should do what’s right for them. If they are going to college just because somebody told them it’s best, that usually doesn’t work out. But I also think they should consider the benefits of a college education, other than what type of job you can get. I do find that there are benefits beyond that. 

Some are not seeing that job opportunities are wider with a college degree. If you are trained in one industry and you don’t enjoy it, you don’t have as much flexibility as someone with a college degree. You’re 17 years old, how do you know you want to be an electrician? 

When they make the decision, they need to be open to everything so that they know for sure it is the right one for them and not just one they made because they didn’t work to explore their options. 

I think what needs to be done more in schools is career exposure. Students are mostly making decisions based on what they see on the internet, what they read, and random examples. They’re not really experiencing the world of work because we have such an academic focus in our schools. Many schools promote college prep, and it almost seems like career things are considered ‘anti-college.’ 

That might be doing students a disservice to students who don’t get to see all these careers and what they look like. So I do think schools should do more with career guidance. I’m in support of career education, apprenticeships, and dual enrollment, but it should be done for careers you get with a college degree, not just trade school careers. It does seem like when schools do have career programs, they tend to be in the trades. It should be both. 

This article is part of a collaboration between ����Ӱ�� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

 People are exhausted and desperate for some good news. Well, we now have some.      

Despite the virulent and largely inaccurate charges levied against higher education, the American public may hear it but clearly doesn’t buy into the raft of misinformation. In a recent , seven out of 10 adults without a college degree believe both a bachelor’s degree and an associate’s degree are either extremely or very valuable. And despite the costs, a majority in the poll believe college will pay off within five years.

In perhaps the best piece of news, a about the quality of their college classes found that 72% consider their classes to be either “excellent” or “very good,” and half were very confident their college education and degree would result in positive career opportunities.    

This positive view of higher education also extends to seniors in high school. In 2025, the percentage of seniors who have filled out their FAFSA forms has increased by 13% over 2024, and the percentage of seniors filling out the Common App for college admissions increased by 4%, with the number of first-generation college goers increasing by 13%. 

According to the , the largest gains are among students from low-income neighborhoods. This is significant because the decline in birth rates has affected the size of the youth population. Add all of this to the fact that nationwide this past fall college enrollment was up by 3.4%, it is clear that the notion that “college doesn’t matter” has little truth. 

This news is particularly important because labor market data shows that by 2031, despite the phrase “college doesn’t matter,” more than seven of every 10 jobs will require a post-secondary degree or credential. , those entering the workforce with a college degree earn more than $1 million more over their lifetimes compared to those with only a high school diploma. We see growth in the semiconductor industry due to the CHIPS and Science Act, growth in health careers, green jobs, and a host of labor market areas.      

This doesn’t mean our higher education systems can’t improve. They can and they must improve. The growth in micro-credentials is a significant innovation offering students an opportunity to earn industry credentials that are both credit-bearing and stackable toward a degree.

In New York State, the Power Authority, a big green jobs employer, is partnering with SUNY to not only double the number of micro-credentials for green jobs but also offer them to high school students in some of the state’s , at no cost. This year Gov. Kathy Hochul announced free community college tuition for students seeking degrees in areas of labor market growth. 

Other colleges and universities have begun providing an opportunity for a bachelor’s degree in three years, rather than four, reducing the time and cost of a degree. Others, including SUNY, have expanded the use of credit for prior learning, allowing military service, community service, work experience and other backgrounds to qualify students for academic credit, also reducing the cost and time of a degree. 

The P-TECH approach, which offers a model of education combining high school and college via dual enrollment along with industry engagement, has spread to over 500 schools across 28 countries. It offers a clear pathway from school to college to career for students regardless of income or achievement levels. Many employers — including IBM, Cisco, Northwell Health, Micron, GlobalFoundries, and the NY Power Authority — are seeing strong results from this model. An by MDRC demonstrates its success, especially for low-income students and students of color.

While some of the issues involving education appear to inspire more division than unity, this isn’t the case on the need for a clear pathway from school to college to career. This is an issue that unites and doesn’t divide. It is this unity that will bring together Republican and Democrat governors, education leaders, business and labor leaders, and student representatives at the on Thursday to discuss the need for innovative paths from school to college to career.  

It will take all of us — regardless of political affiliation — to achieve success for our nation. We must examine models of success together and identify ways to make them scalable and sustainable with clear solutions that include more experiential learning, career guidance and exploration, and access to academic and workplace skill development.  

It is true that these are difficult and challenging times. But the good news story — about the latest poll numbers, the degree to which education leaders are willing and able to innovate and the unity demonstrated at the upcoming summit — give me some hope.

The broad political support for career pathways isn’t a fluke: It was between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. With the law supporting these programs due to be and the , career pathways will be on a short list of issues that could move quickly in this divided Congress.

Given this bipartisan momentum, how can leaders in Washington create programs that truly prepare students for jobs and fulfillment in the real world? They can start by learning from successful career pathways programs that are already flourishing in red, blue and purple states across the country. 

For example, Colorado demonstrates that successful career pathways programs can’t be one-size-fits-all: They must meet the needs of students in communities with very different economies and job markets. That means policymakers designing pathways programs should speak to local government leaders, school leaders, educators and students to understand potential barriers to student participation and success. 

Leaders of the Colorado Succeeds career pathways initiative conduct a local needs assessment that covers every region of the state every two years — and adjust policies, funding or programming based on what they hear. Through this assessment, leaders learned that high school students participating in dual enrollment were limited to attending their local community college, regardless of whether it was affordable or offered the program they wanted. Colorado Succeeds leaders shared this information with the state Department of Higher Education, which then changed the policy to enable high school students to enroll regionally and virtually at community colleges across the state.

By regularly gathering and acting on feedback from communities, Colorado Succeeds has not only strengthened its statewide programs, but built trust among business leaders, educators and students.

Knowing that flexibility and innovation are essential to building effective pathways programs that meet changing student and economic needs, leaders in Indiana embrace creative, outside-the-box ideas and refine them as they go.

Recently, the state’s Department of Education redesigned its in an innovative way — a process that required many rounds of refining that ultimately offered graduates three pathways: college, career or military. The state also created the Indiana Career Scholarship Account program to provide funding to high school students for work-based learning opportunities like internships and apprenticeships. And they expanded course options by allowing more people with relevant industry experience but no traditional teaching license to head up classes that require highly technical knowledge.

In Delaware, new approaches show that while bold new ideas are important for innovation in career pathways, so are adaptability and resilience. Leaders shouldn’t expect to get everything right on the first try, but they should expect that regular adjustments will bring them closer to creating programs that effectively serve more students. That requires a well-designed data system and using it to decide whether specific programs should continue, shift or end.

Delaware regularly reviews its career pathways programming and uses data to make necessary changes. Committees of educators, students and employers review all career and technical education programs in the state every five years. By regularly working with a wide range of partners, state leaders ensure that this programming remains up-to-date and relevant for students.

Delaware’s data also inform ongoing adjustments to program offerings and funding. For example, when data revealed that high school students with disabilities participated in pathways programs in lower numbers than students without disabilities, Delaware officials made policy changes that improved access for all students.

Building successful career pathways programs is hard work, but Colorado, Indiana, Delaware and many other states show what’s possible by listening to local leaders, thinking creatively and using data to guide improvement. Leaders in Washington have a rare opportunity to embrace common ground on this issue, give students a leg up in high-demand careers and help maintain America’s competitive edge in the global economy. They must not squander it.

With the nation’s second largest school district now offering nearly 450  programs across 160 schools, Los Angeles Unified students are embracing CTE. 

More than 47,000 students have access to programs that range from internships and dual enrollment courses to clubs, electives and required classes aligned with core academic subjects. 

Earlier this month, hundreds of high schoolers demonstrated new skills at the California Endowment Center, from horticulture to computer programming, while middle school students toured booths and explored the programs they could soon join.

“I want to go into landscaping, designing people’s yards,” said senior Serenity Flores, who takes a horticulture class at Sylmar Charter High School. “And this class kind of brought me around to that.”

District data shows these offerings are growing fast. The number of paid student interns more than doubled, rising from just over 700 in 2023–24 to more than 1,600 this school year.

Industry certifications have also grown in popularity. Students earned more than 6,000 credentials in 2023-24, a 60% increase from the previous year, in areas like Microsoft Office, food handling and CPR.

One reason for the increase is the rise of Linked Learning, a California-based program that blends academics with career exploration and college credit.

The  began in 2009 as a pilot in nine school districts. Today, it’s grown to more than 50 districts. In LAUSD,  participated during the 2023–24 school year.

Romero’s school, Hilda Solis High School in Boyle Heights, is one of many that offers a .

“I really enjoy it because it shows that I’m capable of doing things like this,” said Ivan Romero, who is enrolled in the school’s engineering design class.

To meet rising demand, the district announced a two-year pilot program in 2024 to trai new CTE teachers. LAUSD officials  was to address the growing need for skilled educators in CTE programs. 

The pilot will support 25 new CTE teachers per year and pair each with a mentor. 

According to a U.S. Department of Education study, students who took two or more CTE courses had a 94% graduation rate, compared to 86% for those who didn’t. Employers are also on board, with 96% viewing CTE applicants favorably.

Many of these students are graduating high school with certifications or finished college courses. 

“Basically, when they graduate, they can start working,” said an LAUSD spokesman. “The emphasis on it is, when they get out of college, they’re ready to go to work.”

Although most students said the courses help build on their college plans or inform them of higher education choices, some have chosen blue-collar and trade programs as an alternative.  

Sergio Garcia, a senior at Banning High School, gets to learn how to put out fires and do CPR from the Los Angeles Fire Department. Other students said they had never thought of becoming a firefighter before being introduced to the course. Now they can expect to have certifications and be working for fire departments straight out of high school. 

Some educators say all students, not just the ones in blue-collar programs, should have that opportunity. Darryl Sher, who teaches the robotics club at LACES Magnet School, said students are often told college is the only route. CTE programs show otherwise.

“Most of them are going to college, but they could get jobs in tech right out of high school,” Sher said.

Even if the majority of students plan to go to college, or need a degree to pursue their ultimate career goals, there are plenty of programs to help students earn money right out of high school. 

“Some have automotive programs, some have food safety courses,” Frank said, highlighting auto repair and customer service jobs as starting industries for many students. “They can get a job and do something that can support their college education.” 

This article is part of a collaboration between ����Ӱ�� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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PPI’s Bruno Manno will first lead a conversation with Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, about the potential for AI to accelerate the pace of change and what this means for students and workers. 

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More AI coverage from ����Ӱ��: 

• AI Education Is the New Space Race. Here’s How America Must Respond

• OpenAI’s Education Leader on AI’s ‘Massive Productivity Boost’ for Schools, Teachers

• AI-Fueled Testing, From the Mouths of Babes

• Artificial Intelligence and Schools: When Tech Makers and Educators Collaborate, AI Doesn’t Have to be Scary

• Leanlab Founder Says Ed Tech Should Root Itself in Community Voice, Co-Design

This is the brilliance of the early college program, allowing all students access to the kind of free education everyone should have. My school, , provides a place to think, rise to the occasion of college, and become a better human being. 

My mother homeschooled me and my elder brothers through elementary and middle school. We couldn’t afford private school, but our parents did the best with the little they had. My mother would drive us around the greater Maryland area to take a variety of classes, exposing us to tons of different fields and building our interests in both STEM and the arts. I would not have had as strong an educational foundation if I had started out in the deeply flawed public school system.

When we reached high school, all three of us transferred into Bard, a four-year public school that offers two years of college coursework starting in junior year. In June, I will graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree. 

At many schools, students have to pay for International Baccalaureate (IB) or for Advanced Placement (AP) exams to earn college credit. My program, one of 10 Bard Early College runs  around the country, offers both challenging material and college credits all for no cost, so students are spending their time learning about new ideas and skills. 

I have taken courses such as screenwriting, game development, and college physics to fulfill my AA credit requirements. However, “seminar” is the only class universal to early college scholars. I first encountered “F�����԰��Բ��ٱ𾱲�” as a junior, considering the theme of justice in companion with Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics.” This year, my professor introduced Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Theory: Reading Culture,” a collection of essays, as a lens for analyzing “Frankenstein.” Differing insights bloomed from the separate readings: What is Victor’s responsibility to the Creature? How was Victor himself “monsterized?” 

Furthermore, the early college program offers better preparation for the workforce. The National Center for Education Statistics’s report shows that adults with a higher degree of education also have better paying jobs.

For seniors who choose the college route immediately after high school, the early college program is a head start. They are already acclimated to the culture and jargon of college: registering for classes, using professors’ office hours, and advocating for themselves. 

For all early college students, transferable credits accelerate their post-secondary studies, saving money and allowing them to jump straight into more advanced courses of study. Because they have done two years’ worth of college-level work, these graduates will be more than ready to meet the demanding standards that colleges and universities are looking for. 

The found that 84% of its graduates returned for a second year of college, either at the same or at a different post-secondary institution. In 2022, the retention rate for Baltimore City Public Schools graduates averaged 49%, according to the .

Although monetary benefits have their place, my favorite aspect of the early college program is the emphasis on civic and intellectual engagement. Cultivating individuals with an innate sense of responsibility to their local and global community is far more critical than material success. 

In my first year at Bard, I resolved to focus solely on academics. The diversity in perspectives within the curriculum partnered with the method of relating the “classics” to the contemporary time was refreshing. However, silently sitting in the same classes everyday was Sisyphean. 

I only felt a sense of belonging when I started opening up to my teachers, who then helped me form relationships with my peers. For the duration of my time at Bard, I grew into a natural role as a teacher’s assistant and student mentor, realizing education was not just about satisfying curiosity, but about building relationships. 

It only became meaningful when I shared and engaged with others’ ideas, leading me to want to pursue teaching as a way of repaying my local community. In a nutshell, the early college program is truly about understanding humans and improving the world. 

A good education should be a right just by virtue of being human, not a privilege only afforded to some. The early college program makes this possible through its commitment to bringing college to high schoolers, preparing them for future success in their professional and personal lives. This is the path to creating a better, more illuminated, and empathetic society. 

If anyone could sell you a $2 million school bus, it’s Karina Butler.

The 17-year-old spent last fall learning about hydrogen fuel cells — New York school districts must stop buying conventional diesel buses by 2027, and by 2035, Butler explained, all school buses in the state must operate electrically. 

The new buses are clean, she said, but at $2 million apiece they’re also “very pricey.” That’s a tough sell for cash-strapped districts in the state’s capital region. So working with a local , she and three classmates developed a pitch for the company to deliver to nearby districts.

A senior at Tech Valley High School in Albany, N.Y., Butler is by now used to this. She said she owes her confidence to the school, which pushes students to embrace discomfort and grow into their own through an unusual mixture of corporate-inspired teamwork, self-discovery and personal attention from adults.

When it opened in 2007, Tech Valley was at the forefront of project-based STEM learning. One of the early schools, it was conceived during a high-tech building boom, taking its name from a marketing campaign in the late 1990s to promote eastern New York State as a high-tech competitor to Silicon Valley.

But while other schools built on the principles of STEM, projects or corporate partnerships have come and gone, Tech Valley has endured for nearly two decades. Now in its own boxy two-story building on another tech campus, it endures due to an unusual funding structure, small size and a close-knit community.

It’s not a charter school and it’s not a traditional district school. Technically, it’s a state-funded technical school underwritten by two regional chapters of New York’s Board of Cooperative Education Services, or , which typically offer training programs in welding, cosmetology and the like. Many rural districts rely on BOCES programs for one-off courses they can’t afford.

Tech Valley offers a BOCES program in STEM-focused, project-based learning that spans four years. Instead of a license or certificate, students earn a full diploma, taking a full load of courses that includes one year of computer science and two of Mandarin. 

“I sometimes personally call it ‘a unicorn school’ because it’s something that doesn’t exist in nature,” said Sarah Hugger, Tech Valley’s outreach coordinator.

Even after 17 years, it enrolls just 150 students. As a BOCES program, the school draws students from 30 school districts via random lottery. The small size means virtually everyone knows each other.

“You literally can’t avoid anybody here,” said junior Willow Kabel. While she’s not good friends with all of her classmates, “I’d say I’m friendly with everyone.”

She added: “A lot of us are introverts, so we don’t want to socialize. But the introverts find each other.”

In their applications, most prospective students say they’re looking for something different from what they got in their first eight years of schooling. Many write of bullying in elementary and middle school, often over gender identity. Others, from small towns, simply don’t want to continue with the same handful of kids they’ve always known. 

“Everyone is coming from other districts, so no matter how many friends you had at your home district, coming here is basically starting over,” said junior George Hartman. “And I think what that really does is it puts everyone on such a level ground.”

Once they arrive, students encounter a program in which many classes are team-taught and interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on — perhaps even an obsession with — collaboration. Open-access, flexible work spaces dot the building, inviting impromptu brainstorms and conversations. Teachers long ago ditched the traditional coffee-and-donuts teachers’ lounge for a central common work space with a long work table. Students are welcome.

Long, multi-period, interdisciplinary classes are the norm rather than the exception, and teachers’ time planning lessons together “is non negotiable,” said special education teacher Danielle Hemmid. 

The school assesses students not just on communication and literacy but on their ability to work together to get things done. “We know that being able to collaborate with others is going to help you now and in the future,” said Principal Amy Hawrylchak. “So we want to give you those tools and skills while you’re here.”

For students, the responsibilities they bear for group projects are well understood. Unlike in many high schools that dabble in projects — these days that’s basically every school — students at Tech Valley are graded not just on their work but on how they share and delegate tasks. 

Freshman Ari Story recalled that when he was assigned a project at his previous school, “I would just sit there and think, ‘What am I going to do? How do I start this? How do I continue? How do I spread it out?’ I wouldn’t know what to do”

Teachers look closely at who’s doing what and assign (or withhold) “collaboration points.” Senior Teddy DuBois noted that in a few circumstances, teachers might even check the revision history on a shared document to determine if one person typed it all. Typically, though, teachers get good at spotting team members who are skating by and letting others do the work. 

Eventually, skating by catches up: After three warnings, a student who’s not participating can be removed from a team and lose valuable points. 

“Here, if you don’t work together, you don’t really pass, and you don’t do well,” said Hartman. 

Hawrylchak studied student and teacher agency in graduate school and as a result the school is thick with it. Virtually all clubs and activities, from debate to drama to flag football, are student-run.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the school attracts a large number of neurodivergent students. At last count, 35% of Tech Valley students arrived with either an individualized education plan or a less restrictive 504. Even with such a small student body, the school employs three full-time special education teachers.

“We’re bridging this gap between who you were in elementary and middle school and how you are going to function in college,” said Hemmid, the special education teacher. That most commonly looks like helping kids develop so-called “executive functioning” skills that allow them to work independently. 

The goal, she said, is to help every graduate do well in college with minimal accommodations such as more time on exams or extra help in a writing center. 

By planning together, Hemmid said, teachers are able to anticipate the challenges students bring and navigate them. “The classroom just runs and it should be so that I don’t need to say, ‘Quick, let me prepare something so that my students can do this work.’” 

While a direct comparison with local high schools is difficult, Hawrylchak said that with few exceptions students attend Tech Valley all four years. Of those, virtually 100% graduate.

“Students who stay here graduate,” she said, “and have since we started.”

I-Term and ‘ikigai’

Once a year in the winter, all classes stop for a week so students can take part in a schoolwide “I-Term” that matches them with community partners to explore careers. Like much of the curriculum, the project is guided by the Japanese principle of “ikigai,” or purpose. It asks students to consider not only what they love to do and are good at, but what the world needs and what they might someday do well enough to earn a living.

As freshmen, students explore openly, Hawrylchak said — many freshman boys take this opportunity to shadow game designers at local studios, for instance. But by sophomore year, teachers are asking them to think more holistically about their purpose. “We’re saying, ‘O.K., now we want to add the layer of: What are you good at?’”

It gets more complex: As juniors, they must confront not only their tastes and abilities, but whether the world needs what they have to offer — and how they can make a living doing it. 

Pretty soon, Hawrylchak said, “They’re aware of this entire Venn diagram” that encompasses a larger sense of purpose. That’s when they begin job-shadowing for a week as juniors. As seniors, that becomes a two-week commitment, offering “a deeper, richer experience,” she said.

It all leads to a lot of soul-searching, with students often taking years to narrow down their ideas. One student who loved soccer spent her first I-Term shadowing soccer coaches at both the high school and college levels, then developed an interest in politics and worked in a state senator’s office and, later, for a legislative lobbyist. She eventually attended the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, intending to study politics.

“My deepest hope is that the kid exits high school with a sense of maybe, ‘These are some things I don’t want to do,’ ” Hugger said. “ ‘These are not things that inspire me or make my heart beat fast. And maybe here’s the thing that I do want to do.’ ”

‘The more times I do it, the more skills I learn’

Each fall, seniors spend about six weeks on a capstone project in which they partner with a local business — given the region, that can mean anything from a small advertising studio to IBM or State Street Bank.

Students take a day to “speed date” with company representatives and figure out which one they want to work with. Then they settle in and work out solutions to a problem the company presents. 

For one group this winter, the challenge was to design soundproofing surfaces for a in nearby Troy. DuBois, who wants to study engineering, designed a chandelier that absorbs sounds and a gaming surface that turns into a moveable, soundproof wall, while a classmate proposed panels filled with homegrown mushrooms that absorb sound.

Butler recalled that she was an abysmal public speaker when she arrived at Tech Valley as a freshman. She would cry, laugh — or both — when called upon to make a presentation. Four years later, she is now quite comfortable in front of a crowd. “The more times I do it, the more skills I learn. You get better at it.”

After graduation this spring, she’s hoping to study education or museum curation at a nearby state university campus — she has always loved wandering through museums, ever since she visited one that her grandmother cleaned.

Her previous school couldn’t come close to what Tech Valley offered: 100 community service hours, working with business partners, job shadowing. 

“I wanted to go [here] because they said that you get to go out on your own, discover who you want to be, what you are going to be,” she said. “Instead of just sitting in traditional classes and people talking to you about their careers, you got to experience that.” 

Aaliyah Taylor, a 16-year-old high school sophomore, is used to having more responsibilities than a typical teenager. She helped her dad feed and tend to her grandmother until she died in 2023, tasks that frequently stressed her out as she was trying to manage her own health issues, like her scoliosis.

“I felt like every 5 seconds I was called for something, even though I just sat back down,” she said.

Mariyah Carson, Taylor’s best friend and a 15-year-old freshman, managed similar family duties as her uncle struggled with diabetes-related immobility and blindness until his death a few years ago. She remembers planning with her siblings how they would approach his care.

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“We’d take turns. Like, if you’re doing homework, it’s my turn, and I go down there and watch him,” Carson said. She and Taylor said they continue to help out with other loved ones.

On a recent afternoon inside a Charles Drew High School auditorium, the two sat next to each other at a table topped with plastic bags, fragrant oils, and sugar pouches. The girls quipped and giggled over the instrumental jazz background music while they made body scrub bags, kits intended to help them relax at home.

Carson and Taylor are students at the school in Riverdale, just south of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The body scrub station was the opening activity for this school year’s final session of the Young, Gifted and Caregiving program, a new Atlanta-area initiative to support high-schoolers responsible for taking care of adults or children.

While most of the in the United States are adults, experts estimate that there are who provide this type of work every year. Research on is limited, but that young caregivers struggle to care for themselves and are at higher risk of anxiety and depression, chronic diseases, and dropping out of school.

These risks are what Young, Gifted and Caregiving aims to address. Once a week throughout February and March, Michelle Bolden, a registered nurse and the founder of the Atlanta caregiver support nonprofit , traveled to Charles Drew to lead lessons for 10 students.

She and an array of guest speakers — like attorneys, nurse practitioners, and mental health specialists — have tried to teach the students how to manage caregiving responsibilities while maintaining their own well-being and ambitions.

It’s the first time Bolden, who recently finished a Chamberlain University doctoral nursing program, has hosted in-person classes for high-school caregivers.

“We couldn’t create that community without them being in-person,” Bolden said.

Erin Kent, a caregiver research associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, said that while there’s strong evidence that , there are few, if any, analyses that have examined the best ways to aid high-schoolers with these responsibilities.

But she said evaluating new programs, like the Charles Drew program, is how researchers like herself can determine what could help young people in that position. And school-based initiatives could be more effective at finding teenage caregivers than programs in other settings.

“School is probably going to be the place that reaches more youths,” she said.

School supports teens with caregiving duties at home

Tangela Benjamin had only been Charles Drew’s principal for a few months when she was called to address a student meltdown in October 2023. The sleep-deprived girl complained about how the school’s rules conflicted with family duties.

“She said, ‘A lot of parents don’t parent, and responsibilities that should be on adults are on teenage kids,’” Benjamin said. “And she was like, ‘I happen to be one of these kids with all of these responsibilities.’”

The principal knew there were plenty of students in Riverdale, where the is $16,000 below , who face hardships at home even without tending to their loved ones’ needs. Learning that some faced an extra set of duties, Benjamin said she felt obligated to find a way to extend the school’s support.

“It was very much a great eye opener, and it quickened my spirit a bit,” she said.

It’s a big reason why a year later, when she met Bolden and heard about her work, she jumped at an opportunity to bring a program tailored for high-school caregivers to Charles Drew. Last fall, the Charles Drew staff put together an email survey to find students who have been informal family caregivers. The administrators identified 30 students, and they invited 10 to join the Young, Gifted and Caregiving program.

Bolden wanted to help all 30, but she said it would be difficult to create deep connections with that many students.

“Once it gets too large, they’re not going to talk,” she said.

Those 10 students, including Taylor and Carson, were invited to attend four weekly classes throughout the winter to learn about how to balance their family responsibilities and their own well-being. Among the skills facilitators taught in each session were basic CPR techniques, chronic disease management, and supportive strategies.

The Young, Gifted and Caregiving program also hosted a , a fundraiser for the school and for a program to give from their family duties. Bolden said one of the caregiver students on the Charles Drew cross-country team won the race.

At the start of the high school program, Bolden wasn’t sure how long it would take the students to feel comfortable sharing about home lives and experiences with caregiving. But she said it was clear from the first session that they were open to it.

“I thought it would go really slow,” she said. “But they just picked up and really engaged right away.”

Program helps teens balance caregiving with self-care

At the final session this school year, Bolden invited two guest speakers to share how the students could make plans to prioritize their own health needs while tending to their family members.

It’s a balance some of the Charles Drew caregivers are still trying to figure out. While working at a local farmers market over the summer, Zahion Mikell, a 16-year-old sophomore who helps care for his siblings and great grandmother, remembers scampering from one task to the next when another employee asked to check his blood pressure.

“I was just ripping and running, ripping and running,” said Mikell, who also serves as a .

The screening showed that he was at risk of hypertension, and the other employees told him to take care of his health.

Mikell said he tried to do that. But at the first student session of the Young, Gifted and Caregiving program, when Bolden and the other facilitators were teaching the students how to use a blood pressure pump cuff with their family members, they used Mikell’s arm in a demonstration. Once again, his numbers concerned the adults around him.

Since then, Bolden and the Call for Caring workers have made sure to check Mikell’s blood pressure at their weekly meetings. While reading his levels at that final session, Bolden told him he had moved from the “red zone” to the “yellow zone.”

“So that’s good,” Mikell said.

“But for you that’s high,” Bolden responded. “No, not good.”

“I like yellow though,” Mikell replied as the adults around him laughed.

Some of the students expressed the mental and emotional toll that caregiving has taken on their well-being. Tiandra Hodge, another 16-year-old sophomore, has only lived in the metro Atlanta area over the summer. She’s from the British Virgin Islands, but she left her parents and life in the Caribbean to finish her education in the United States last summer.

Hodge lives with her sister and helps feed and bathe her sister’s children, all under age 6. When the stress of adjusting to a new country, a new high school, and a new set of family responsibilities becomes overwhelming, Hodge said she can forget to eat.

She said she has few options to vent about her problems with anyone in-person.

“It’s very difficult,” she said.

That’s one of the reasons she said she’s found the Young, Gifted and Caregiving class helpful. At the end of that fourth session, in response to Bolden asking the student caregivers to share one thing that stood out about the class, Hodge focused on the shared community the program had created.

“I don’t have nobody to talk to about this,” Hodge told everyone in the auditorium.

Caregivers get continued support as they dream big about future

Bolden is excited for Young, Gifted and Caregiving’s future. She plans to lead another session at Charles Drew next school year, hoping to engage and support the other caregiver students who couldn’t fit in the first year.

She also hopes to recreate the program in at least two other Georgia schools this year. Bolden wants to host a series at one of Atlanta’s high schools and a middle school in Sandy Springs.

With these plans of expansion, she said she wants to make clear to this year’s Charles Drew students that support for them won’t wither away. Throughout the final session, Bolden brought up multiple times that her nonprofit would continue to engage with the inaugural class members and help with any challenges they might continue to experience.

She even suggested that they could be student ambassadors for the next Charles Drew caregivers in the program.

“These are adults you can trust and still be able to network,” Bolden told the students, gesturing at the Call for Caring workers and the Charles Drew staff who had joined the session. “I don’t want you to think that because you’re here in this situation, it’s not going to get better.”

Kent, the University of North Carolina professor, said one long-term benefit she’d expect from a program like Bolden’s is that the students now know that they are caregivers. With that knowledge, she said, the teenagers can start to seek out help for any issues that may come up.

Just before getting some cake to celebrate the class’s completion, Taylor, the 16-year-old who cared for her grandmother, talked about her future aspirations. She envisions moving to Houston and working as a chef or an entrepreneur.

But if she’s put in a position where she has to care for adults again, like her parents, Taylor said she feels more prepared to meet that task. She’s a little nervous about forgetting the lessons of the past month, but she now knows there are resources for people in her position.

“I would be more experienced to help my mom and my dad once they get a little bit older.”

Allen Siegler is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Allen at asiegler@healthbeat.org.

Healthbeat is a nonprofit newsroom covering public health published by , which also publishes Chalkbeat. Sign up for Healthbeat’s newsletters .

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

McCORMICK — Cows compose the greeting committee at the Governor’s School for Agriculture, flocking to the fence just past the entrance to watch visitors drive past.

Established in 1797 as a farming school for poor and orphaned children, the campus known for centuries as John de la Howe has changed missions several times. The latest turned it into the nation’s only residential public high school providing an agricultural education.

Pastures of horses, sheep and cows dot the 1,310-acre property tucked off a rural road in McCormick County inside a national forest.

The campus’ dozen residential halls are full, and for the first time since the new mission began, officials are having to turn away prospective students because of a lack of space, said Tim Keown, the school’s president.

Two more halls sit mostly empty as they await decorations from the school’s alumni committee and, next year, a new batch of students to fill them.

After a rocky start, including findings of ethical and financial mismanagement during the school’s first year after the change, things are looking up, Keown said.

Last year, the school regained the accreditation it lost in 2016. And for the first time in 25 years, auditors last year found no problems, a rare accomplishment for a state agency, he said.

Driving through the expansive campus, where classrooms abut greenhouses and open pastures, Keown described a vision for the school’s future, including continuing to expand its capacity and offering more classes to cover the full spectrum of agriculture.

His ideas have gotten support from the House of Representatives’ budget writers.

That chamber’s state spending plan for 2025-26, , includes $2 million for continuing renovations and $4 million for a new meat processing plant.

“We don’t expect (students) to all go back and be full-time farmers,” Keown said. “But there are hundreds of thousands of jobs across South Carolina that need young people to enter those jobs.”

Becoming a school for agriculture

The mission adopted in 2020 is a return to the school’s roots.

Dr. John de la Howe, a French doctor who immigrated to Charleston in 1764, that he wanted the farm he had purchased to be an agricultural seminary for “12 poor boys and 12 poor girls,” giving preference to orphans, Keown said.

For years, that was what the school was.

During World War I, John de la Howe became a state agency and a home for orphaned children, which it remained until the 1980s. Then, as orphanages waned in use, its purpose adjusted again to become a public residential school for sixth- through 10-graders with serious behavior problems.

That, too, fell out of favor over the years, as more counties established programs that kept troubled teens closer to home.

Attendance dropped, and costs per students skyrocketed.

In 2003, then-Gov. Mark Sanford recommended, without success, closing the school and sending its students to a military-like public school in West Columbia for at-risk teens. In 2014, Gov. Nikki Haley recommended putting the Department of Juvenile Justice in charge.

, with the school’s accreditation on probation, House budget writers recommended temporarily transferring oversight to Clemson University.

Weeks later, the the school’s accreditation. Deficiencies cited by inspectors included classes taught by uncertified teachers, the school not meeting the needs of students with disabilities, and the lack of online access.

That forced the Legislature to make a decision.

Legislators eventually settled on creating a third residential high school offering a specific education. The agriculture school joined existing governor’s schools for the arts and for science and math.

The year the school was supposed to open its doors to its first new class of students, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Distancing restrictions meant students could no longer share rooms, so the school halved its capacity and began its first year with 33 students.

The next year, the school’s population doubled.

At the start of the 2024 school year, 81 students were enrolled, and another 81 had graduated. Once renovations in three dorms are complete, the capacity will increase to 124, plus day students, Keown said.

“It’s been like putting together a huge puzzle with many missing pieces over the last couple of years,” Keown said. “But we’re finally finding all those pieces, and it’s all making more sense.”

The new mission

Blake Arias knew he wanted to study plants. Other than that, he had little interest in agriculture when he applied for the governor’s school.

“If you looked at my application, it was very obvious that I didn’t have a background and that I didn’t know much,” Arias said.

When he first arrived at the school nearly three hours from his home in Summerton, he wasn’t particularly interested in handling animals. And he really, really didn’t want to learn to weld.

Three years later, Arias, who graduates this spring, still focuses primarily on plants.

However, he also spends hours every day after class helping a rabbit, Chunky, lose some weight before he takes her to shows. He’s working on earning a beekeeping certification. And he even learned how to weld.

“Am I the best welder? Absolutely not,” Arias said. “But I really enjoyed it, and it taught me something new because they gave me the opportunity.”

Arias is part of about half of the school’s population that comes in with little background in agriculture, Keown said. Applicants must have . The goal is to take all kinds of students, whether they grew up on a farm or in a city and show them all sorts of opportunities in agriculture.

That’s not limited to farming.

The school offers four designated pathways: agricultural mechanics, horticulture, plant and animal systems, and environmental and natural resources. Students choose a focus, but they’re introduced to a sampler platter of what’s out there, Keown said.

“It really shows you all the possibilities that there are in each field,” said Emily White, a senior from McCormick.

Day to day

The days typically begin long before students report to the cafeteria at 7:45 a.m.

Like on any farm, horses, pigs and rabbits need feeding and cleaning, and plants need tending.

Students take a blend of core classes, such as English, math and social studies, and classes focused on agriculture, Keown said.

Even the core classes, which are all honors-level courses, typically use agriculture as a touch point for students, said Lyle Fulmer, a recent graduate.

Math problems, for instance, might use real-life examples of balancing a budget on a farm. For students interested in agriculture, that adds excitement to what might usually be their hum-drum classes, he said.

“Even if it was frustrating and I didn’t know how to solve the problem, I would work through it and I would know that this was something that I very well could be doing someday,” said Fulmer, who is now a freshman at Clemson University.

Once classes are over, students have the rest of the afternoon to do as they please.

White said she typically goes to the pig barn to clean, feed and work with Hank the Tank, a pig she’s planning to show.

Other students might practice rodeo riding or clay shooting, two of the sports the school offers. Some gather at the saw mill to help process trees salvaged when Tropical Storm Helene swept through campus last September.

By 6:15 p.m., students are expected to return to their residence halls or other communal areas for an hour of study time. Like college students, they have the run of their residence halls under the watchful eye of a residential advisor.

Along with accumulating credits to get ahead in college courses, the freedom Fulmer had as a high school student helped prepare him for living in the dorms and all the challenges that accompany that. He already knew how to keep his space tidy and handle disagreements with roommates, which many incoming freshmen don’t, he said.

“It really did prepare me a lot for college,” Fulmer said.

What the future holds

Standing on the front lawn of the president’s mansion, glimpses of the dining hall visible across an expansive open lawn, Keown described his vision of the school’s future.

In the next couple of years, the school will start offering classes in culinary arts and hospitality management, which will help students who want to go into the growing industry of agritourism that creates attractions out of farms.

“Our ag kids learn to grow (the food), our culinary students prepare it, our tourism hospitality students manage the banquets,” Keown said of his vision.

Also in the near future is the meat processing plant, which Keown hopes to have finished in the next three years. That will give students skills to land high-paying jobs straight out of high school and fill a gap in the agricultural industry, Keown said.

A decade from now, Keown hopes to see 300 students roaming the grounds. He also wants them to grow about half of what they eat, compared with 20% now.

In Keown’s mind, the school presents a bright spot for the future of agriculture. While the number of farmers under the age of 35 has grown slightly in recent years, the average age of farmers is 58, according to the U.S Department of Agriculture.

Photos of recent alumni hung from flagpoles on campus. Driving under them, Keown named each graduate and where they went to school. Many go to Clemson, though some went to schools in other states.

Most are still pursuing degrees in agriculture.

“They are making us really proud,” Keown said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com.

When 17-year-old Mackayla James sat down this month with three of the 11 candidates vying for open seats on the St. Louis School Board, she wanted to know one thing: How will they take student concerns more seriously and give them more input into the decisions made about their education? 

“This is about building a better educational system,” says James, a junior at KIPP High School in St. Louis. “I’m about to graduate next year, but my sister has yet to enter high school, and I don’t want her to be dealing with the same things that I’m dealing with. Adults always say they can make things better for the next generation. Yet the school system is getting worse. It’s not improving. It’s worsening.”

The contentious election, now just three weeks away, comes as the district faces teacher and bus driver shortages, dwindling student enrollment expected to result in school closures, an audit over alleged misuse of district funds by the prior superintendent and chronically low rates of academic achievement. 

In many ways, St. Louis is similar to other urban school districts attempting to claw their way back from the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In other ways, it’s very different: Child poverty is high – higher, in fact, than 95% of communities nationwide – and crime, though on a downward trajectory, is still high enough that the state may strip the city’s control of its own police force.

James, meanwhile, is one of the St. Louis area high school students selected after a competitive application process to be part of a small cohort that gathers weekly to learn the nuts and bolts of advocacy and how to effectively inject their voices into the political process. The program, Youth Activators, encompasses a handful of semester-long cohorts and summer fellowships operated by Activate Missouri, all of which focus on boosting civic engagement among young people, with the goal of lifting up student voices in under-resourced communities across the state.

Among other things, the program educates students about the ways schools and districts are funded, the reasons funding can be so disparate, the state of education in their communities and how it got to be that way. With help from the organization’s own grassroots leaders, students identify the people in positions of power in their community and build their own advocacy campaigns to advance an issue that’s important to them. 

Vera Pantazis, a 17-year-old junior at Maplewood Richmond High School who is also part of the St. Louis cohort, had questions of her own for the school board candidates. Tutoring to improve math and reading scores is well and fine, she said, but show me the fine print. 

“So you say that you’re going to provide free tutoring for all kids. What’s that going to look like? How are we funding this? Who’s going to be doing the tutoring, you know? Is that going to be for all schools? All grades? I wanted more details on the biggest education proposals.”

The youth engagement effort marks a change in strategy for the education advocacy group, which had been focusing resources on trying to engage, educate and organize parents on the issues.

“We were asking the people most impacted by the systemic inequalities to fix the issue,” says Tiara Jordan-Sutton, founder and executive director of Activate STL, an offshoot of the statewide organization. “But they have so many things on their plate, and if they have to choose between working another job to put food on the table or attending a curriculum night at their kids school or coming to an organizing meeting, they’re gonna choose to put the food on the table. At the end of the day, there’s multiple competing factors that are keeping parents from being able to jump in this fight. So we needed to think about this from another lens.”

That lens is now trained on students, or as Jordan-Sutton likes to remind folks, “the very people who are closest to the issue.” The issue being, of course, the significant academic and fiscal challenges of the K-12 system. According to the most recent NAEP results, just 27% of fourth-grade students in Missouri and 26% of eighth graders are proficient in reading. In math, 36% of fourth graders and 23% of eighth graders are proficient. No grade-score combination reached pre-pandemic level, and the performance gap between white students and Black students hasn’t budged for more than two decades. 

Out of all the districts in Missouri, St. Louis Public Schools posted the third lowest scores on the state’s last year, with just 21% of students passing the English Language arts assessment and 17% passing the math assessment. The chronic disinvestment of the system has pushed families out of the city in droves, reducing total enrollment by roughly 20% over the past decade. 

“A lot of people in St. Louis think that what’s happening here is the norm,” Jordan-Sutton says. “We have an opportunity to get to them [students] earlier, so that by the time they become parents, they have a very different understanding of why education is the way that it is, who’s allowing it to stay this way, and what the factors or levers are that can be pulled for it to actually improve.”

Activate ATL and the youth advocacy programs she oversees are funded by The Opportunity Trust, a nonprofit organization working to strengthen public education for St. Louis students.

The youth advocacy programs include a paid summer fellowship for high school juniors, seniors and recent graduates, which operates weekdays, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., like a real job, and provides young people with a deep understanding about the myriad issues impacting St. Louis – especially education, but also housing and crime – and the tools needed to effectively organize. Among other things, they’re responsible for drafting get-out-the-vote campaigns focused on education equity. 

The semester-long cohorts for high school students run during the school year. Students meet twice a week to learn about how the K-12 system operates and is funded, who controls the purse strings, how the school board operates and who the biggest decision-makers are in the system. They canvas to register students old enough to vote, travel to Jefferson City to meet with legislators at the state capital and draft their own advocacy campaigns related to something they’d like to change at their school. The experience culminates with a pitch contest for a chance to have an advocacy campaign funded and brought to life.

Those pitches include everything from establishing a mental health buddy system among students to increasing the availability of tutoring to becoming more environmentally friendly. For James, who’s biggest concern is lack of communication and understanding of the issues that students face in school, she is considering proposing a plan that would allow a student representative from each high school to sit on the school board. 

“We want students to imagine what school could be like,” says Jordan-Sutton, who began her career as a special education teacher and then principal in Chicago. “What are the things that they love about their school, and what do they wish that they had that’s missing? We tell them, ‘You can do something about that. Let me show you how.’” 

“We teach them how to organize for change in a very structured way,” she says. “It’s not about just staging a protest, or walking out of school, or going to the principal and saying, ‘I want this,’ and expecting the principal to do it. It’s how to fine tune an idea, research it, think through how it should be implemented and whether anyone has ever tried it before. It’s thinking through how to build coalitions of support for it because there’s strength in numbers and how to survey peers to better understand the nuances of it. And finally, it’s about figuring out who in the power dynamics has the ability to implement the change you’re asking for.”

The pivot to focus on youth advocacy is perhaps the next iteration of the national movement that’s taken shape in the wake of the pandemic, with groups like and the helping parents become smarter public education consumers and savvier advocates for change. Yet research shows that young people are eager to be involved in the process, but often feel overlooked by the political process and unprepared or unqualified to take action. 

According to the , young people (18-29) believe that their generation can and should engage in civic life and effect change: 74% said that there are things they can do to make the world a better place, 76% believe that their age group has the power to change things, and 83% recognize the potential of young people working with other generations to create change. However, many don’t feel informed or qualified enough to participate in politics. Only half of youth say they feel they’re “as well-informed as most people,” and even fewer (40%) say that they feel well-qualified to participate in politics. 

Moreover, young people from groups that have historically held less political power were even less likely to feel qualified, with 34% of youth of color saying they feel qualified to participate in politics, compared to 44% of white youth.

In addition, a growing body of shows that when students regard their school leadership as responsive to their expressed input and criticism, students themselves have better grades, attendance and reduced rates of chronic absenteeism. Students who believe they have a voice in school are seven times more likely to be academically motivated than students who do not believe they have a voice, and student voice is also linked to an increased likelihood that students will experience self-worth, engagement, and purpose in school.

“In this moment, with all of these different elections coming up, how do we ensure that the student voice is elevated?” asks Rachel Powers, a senior vice president at The Opportunity Trust. “How do we support students in the same way that we support parents to advocate for what they are looking for, what they need, what they see in their own spaces, in their schools, in their communities?

“We’re trying to get students in that ethos and to understand the power of their collective voice,” she adds. “We know that people who go to the polls don’t always look like people who are served in our schools. And that’s something we point out and ask them, who’s making the real decisions about what happens to you, and do you want to be involved in making decisions that impact you and your community?”

Disclosure: The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

LINCOLN – Soon after beginning her studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, McKenzie Murphy, then 19, applied for a part-time job.

She had graduated from high school only a few months earlier, but Murphy’s application also read “graduate, associates degree, Northeast Community College.”

Her interviewer didn’t believe that someone so young could have a two-year college degree.

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“Oh my gosh, when did you graduate?” Murphy was asked.

In May of 2023, Murphy received her diploma from Bancroft-Rosalie High School. But because she had participated in a state dual enrollment program, she also earned a college degree by taking college-level classes while in high school — classes that came with both college and high school credits.

During her last semester of high school, Murphy took 21 credit hours of such dual enrollment classes, completing a lot of general education courses normally taken at colleges or universities, but also learning about investing.

“I like to stay busy,” she said.

A strong head start

This year, more than 20,000 Nebraska high school students at more than 200 schools across the state are taking dual enrollment classes, with hundreds each year, like Murphy, graduating with two diplomas when they finish high school.

Students, including those home-schooled or in private schools, get discounted tuition when taking the classes. In two areas of the state, tuition and books are free, those served by Omaha-based Metropolitan Community College and Norfolk-centered Northeast Community College.

But the future affordability of the program for families statewide is being threatened by a reduction in funding.

The $5 million a year from the federal pandemic-related American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) is going away, leaving only $3 million a year in state funding remaining.

On Thursday, several administrators of community colleges and Nebraska high schools joined a student and a representative of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry in testifying in favor of state legislation to keep the program affordable for high school students and their families. It would provide an additional $21 million over the next two years to continue.

Supporters of the additional funding praised the program as jump-starting student higher education, which they said leads to higher rates of college enrollment and earlier graduation. It also gets students into the workforce sooner, in high-need jobs like welding, teaching and health care, and is a proven way to reverse the “brain drain” exodus of educated young people from Nebraska.

“This maybe has been the most successful higher education partnership with K-12 education and business in all my years in education,” said Randy Schmailzl, the long-time president of Metropolitan Community College, which had nearly 9,000 dual enrollment students this year.

Students, schools embrace program

Mark Shepard, the superintendent of Fremont Public Schools, said the program had helped boost a local career and technical education program that has trained 200 student welders over the past nine years. Seventy of those trained are now working in well-paying, high-demand jobs in the state, he said.

“We view these programs as a true game changer for our state,” Shepard said of the technical training offered in Fremont through dual enrollment.

Murphy, whose family lives in Walthill, said she could not have taken the classes she did if she had been required to pay full tuition, which is $108 per credit hour at Northeast Community College.

At her high school, students have taken 790 credit hours of tuition-free dual enrollment classes this year with eight of the 18 members of the senior class on track to graduate with community college associate degrees, according to Jon Cerny, superintendent at Bancroft-Rosalie.

At Millard Public Schools, 2,200 students took dual enrollment classes last year, earning 26,000 credits. Superintendent John Schwartz said that added up to just short of $2 million in tuition that families didn’t have to pay.

The result, the two educators told members of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, is that students complete college sooner and with less debt, and are able to graduate earlier and join the Nebraska workforce.

“It’s hard to find a better program that supports young people and our economy,” said Michael Johnson of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce, who called the state’s shortage of workers “the number-one barrier to economic growth in the state.”

“This program presents a win-win-win opportunity for all of us,” said State Sen. Jason Prokop of Lincoln.

Bill offers replacement funding

His proposal, Legislative Bill 173, would provide $10 million for the dual enrollment program in 2025-26 and $11 million the following year.

Prokop said it exceeds the $5 million a year in ARPA funds that are going away because that money hasn’t covered all costs of the program, which are nearing $20 million a year. He said funding also hasn’t kept up with the 65% increase in students taking the courses.

“This program produces a pipeline of skilled labor that Nebraska employers desperately need,” the senator told the committee.

LB 173 wasn’t included in the preliminary budget recommendations of the Appropriations Committee, which is now taking testimony on its proposed budget. Senators are seeking to close a budget gap, leaving little funding for new spending.

Omaha State Sen. Christy Armendariz, a member of the committee, praised the program. But more than once, she asked whether other funds — rather than state taxpayer money — might be found to finance the dual enrollment program, or whether it could be more focused on families who could not afford to pay the tuition.

An official with Northeast Community College said that institution doesn’t have the funds to continue to offer free tuition on its own, and would have to start charging students. Schmailzl said that when Metro used to offer the classes at 50% of full tuition, it “cut a lot of people out.”

Shepard, the Fremont superintendent, said that 40 some businesses have contributed to the vocational programs in his district, but that ending free tuition, or having students fill out a waiver to get a tuition break, would present barriers.

No immediate action

The Appropriations Committee took no action on the bill after the public hearing on Thursday. It received 70 online comments in support of the bill and no opposition.

Murphy, the UNO student, wasn’t able to attend the public hearing. She’s working three part-time jobs as she pursues her pre-medicine degree in hopes of eventually becoming an ophthalmologist.

Besides saving money and getting a jump start on her university studies, she said dual enrollment and the rigors of college classes forced her to get more organized. She made a daily list of what she needed to get done each day.

It also helped her get hired.

“When you see someone who graduates with an associate degree, they realize that’s a hard-working person, Murphy said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Aaron Sanderford for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com.

In some versions of dual enrollment, students take college classes on top of their required high school course load. Requiring extra courses in order to reap the benefits of early college creates a disadvantage for those who work, help with siblings at home or have long commutes to and from school. It can also be a challenge for students already struggling to keep up with advanced courses.

In addition, while some states pay for or subsidize college courses for high schoolers, others make parents shoulder the financial burden. Postsecondary institutions may offer financial aid for economically disadvantaged high schoolers, as they do for their own students, but this adds just another hurdle to what should be a seamless early college experience.

Taken together, this lack of equal access to the time and financial resources needed to pay for, and do well in, college courses can skew participation and successful completion.

By contrast, concurrent enrollment — swapping a college course for a high school class instead of adding it on top of the regular course load — increases students’ opportunity to pay little to nothing for the advanced coursework while enhancing their readiness for college and a future of work.  

The terms dual and concurrent enrollment are often used interchangeably. But in their purest form, they are quite different. Policies that prioritize concurrent enrollment can have a substantial impact on student outcomes and postsecondary access. 

 In Arizona, for example, state law defines concurrent enrollment to mean a student enrolls in a state university or local community college course instead of the high school course he or she would otherwise take. It also requires that the student cost be as close to free as possible. 

In the context of public policy and program design, the seemingly semantic distinction between dual and concurrent enrollment can help improve lifetime outcomes and deliver a future-ready workforce.

Swapping college for high school courses also makes it easier to integrate workplace and college campus experiences into students’ normal school day. Instead of taking extra classes, students can spend their time in career-aligned projects and clubs or even commute to a nearby college to take courses on campus. 

In addition, concurrent credit can limit financial burdens on schools and districts by relieving them of the burdens of having to pay for doubled-up coursework, educators and space, as well as the costs of procuring college-equivalent programs in lieu of actual college courses.

A related policy change — simple, yet critical — would allow for the smooth transfer of earned concurrent credit. When students move from one high school to another, they must often retake courses or submit to a test to transfer college credits they have already earned. It’s a hiccup that adds cost across the system while slowing high school graduation or postsecondary attainment. States can ensure that these concurrent credits transfer when students move or otherwise change schools, and require that the new schools accept credits earned in these rigorous classes without onerous testing. Inefficient transfer policies not only threaten early college, but on-time high school graduation.

Concurrent enrollment can also respond to the increased demand from families and students for a transformed high school experience that is more relevant in today’s world. As the leader of a college prep network, I know firsthand how concurrent enrollment is meeting the demands of a new generation of parents and students.

Millennial parents are seeking ways to save on college costs, and their children want high school to be more engaging and relevant to their futures. Offering them postsecondary opportunities aligned to a career does just that.

Policymakers around the country should adopt equitable policies and funding for concurrent enrollment while helping educators implement these models. This will accelerate the efficiencies, economic mobility and work readiness that postsecondary learning provides. 

Large investments in dual enrollment have boosted interest in and access to postsecondary education. But after decades of implementation around the country, clarity is developing on how best to accelerate these gains, eliminate redundancies and deliver a future-ready workforce. Concurrent enrollment is that promising path forward.

Part of NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, the center offers roughly a dozen summer courses that engage students in advanced STEM research before they graduate from high school. Half of the classes are free — an effort to reach those underrepresented in STEM fields, such as students of color or youth from low-income families.

Each program provides experience that can’t be found in the typical classroom, said center director Ben Esner. The courses tap into research that’s externally funded and managed by NYU undergraduate and graduate students. 

“There is nobody teaching chemical engineering at a New York City public high school, right? Nobody’s doing protein engineering,” he said. “Kids get coding experience, software development experience, but even if you’re getting that in school, and even if you go to a top [STEM] high school, it’s still limited in what they’re teaching.”

Over the last five years, the center has served more than 3,000 middle and high school students from around the U.S., Esner said. In 2023, there were more than 2,855 applications for roughly 587 openings, according to the . Just under half of the students took classes for free.

Last year, the number of applications jumped to more than 4,800.

The center used to offer professional development programming at all grade levels, including for elementary teachers, but now it focuses on grades 6 through12.

Students have programmed robots to operate more like humans, analyzed local traffic to make transportation more efficient and experimented with proteins that deliver cancer drugs. last several weeks and include subjects like noise pollution, digital media, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and computer engineering. 

One of the center’s most popular programs is Applied Research Innovations in Science and Engineering (ARISE). The 10-week, tuition-free course allows high school students to conduct research among university students in NYU professors’ labs.

In 2023, one ARISE lab , and students used stone tools to learn about human history and behavior. Other include researching a link between cerebral spinal fluid and depression in elderly adults and analyzing data-driven cyberattacks.

LuAnn Williams-Moore, the center’s assistant director, said one of her favorite programs is called Innovation, Entrepreneurship and the Science of Smart Cities. The free course teaches students how to apply engineering skills like circuitry, electronics and coding to challenges in urban areas — and how to market the solutions they come up with. Students learn the process of product development, from building their idea to creating pitch presentations for patents and copyrights. At the end of the program, they participate in a Shark Tank-style event and showcase their projects to entrepreneurs.

One product that students helped develop is a sensor network called , which monitors water levels and collects readings . The project received more than $7 million in city funding in 2023.

“A lot of our programs are about teaching students to think about innovations they want to bring based on the training that we are giving them,” Williams-Moore said. “Okay, now that we’ve trained you, what smart innovation would you bring to your community? What are the problems you see in your community?”

New York City classroom teachers are also involved. Williams-Moore said the center turned to local educators to help create lesson plans and curriculum for last summer’s programming, and teachers act as program supervisors or evaluate course content. It’s one of the ways, Williams-Moore said, that she tries to keep the center’s courses relevant and up to date with current STEM education practices.

“We go to conferences. We look at research papers. I’m thinking about the latest trend, or what’s the latest issue that’s happening or developing in education and what’s happening on the ground in the schools,” she said. 

When sifting through middle school applications, Esner said, the center looks for students with an extreme interest in STEM, as shown through personal essays, teacher recommendations and in-person interviews where candidates complete hands-on activities while being observed by professors. For high schoolers, the center also looks at academic records, extracurricular interests and prerequisite STEM classes.

“We want students who ask questions,” he said. “You’re going to come here and we’re going to teach you this. Why do you want to learn it?”

Esner said it’s important to expose young people to in-depth STEM education before they graduate from high school because it’s easy for them to dismiss those fields before they realize what kind of potentially interesting jobs are out there.

“When students say, ‘Why do I need to learn this?’ Well, you need to learn it because you want to build a robot that helps care for elderly people, or you want to discover a protein that can efficiently deliver a chemotherapy drug to the cells that are damaged,” Esner said. “It’s showing a connection between basic science and math skills and the kinds of fabulous and important things you can do that are socially relevant and personally important to a lot of these young people.”

fall between February and May, depending on the program.

Jill Norton, an education policy adviser in Massachusetts, has a teenage son with dyslexia and ADHD. Shelley Scruggs, an electrical engineer in the same state, also has a teenage son with ADHD. Both students go to the same technical high school.

But last fall, Norton and Scruggs advocated on opposite sides of a Massachusetts ballot referendum scrapping the requirement that high school kids pass a standardized state test to graduate.

Norton argued that without the high bar of the standard exam, kids like hers won’t have an incentive to strive. But Scruggs maintained that kids with learning disorders also need different types of measurements than standardized tests to qualify for a high school diploma.

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Voters approved the referendum last November, 59% to 41%, ending the Massachusetts requirement. There and in most other states, Scruggs’ position against testing is carrying the day.

Just seven states now require students to pass a test to graduate, and one of those — New York — will end its Regents Exam as a requirement by the 2027-28 school year. Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas and Virginia still require testing to graduate, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a group that opposes such mandates.

In Massachusetts, teachers unions favored getting rid of the exam as a graduation requirement. They argued it forced them to teach certain facts at the expense of in-depth or more practical learning. But many business leaders were in favor of keeping the test, arguing that without it, they will have no guarantee that job applicants with high school diplomas possess basic skills.

State by state, graduation tests have tumbled over the past decade. In 2012, half the states required the tests, but that number fell to 13 states in 2019, . The trend accelerated during the pandemic, when many school districts scrapped the tests during remote learning and some decided to permanently extend test exemptions.

Studies have found that such graduation exams disadvantage students with learning disabilities as well as English language learners, and that they aren’t always a good predictor of success in careers or higher education.

An oft-cited 2010 by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin may have ignited the trend to scrap the tests. Researchers’ review of 46 earlier studies found that high school exit exams “produced few of the expected benefits and have been associated with costs for the most disadvantaged students.”

Some states began to find other ways to assess high school competency, such as grades in mandatory courses, capstone projects or technical milestones.

“Minimum competency tests in the 1980s drove the idea that we need to make sure that students who graduate from high school have the bare minimum of skills,” said John Papay, an associate professor of education at Brown University. “By the mid-2000s, there was a reaction against standardized testing and a movement away from these exams. They disappeared during the pandemic and that led to these tests going away.”

Despite the problems with the tests for English learners and students with learning disabilities, Papay said, the tests are “strong predictors of long-term outcomes. Students who do better on the tests go on to graduate [from] college and they earn more.”

Papay, who remains neutral on whether the tests should be required, pointed out that high school students usually have many opportunities to retake the tests and to appeal their scores.

Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, a think tank and advocacy group for underserved communities, noted that in many states, the testing requirements were replaced by other measures.

The schools “still require some students or all students to demonstrate competency to graduate, but students have many more options on how they could do that. They can pass a dual credit [high school/college] course, pass industry recognized competency tests. …

“A lot of states still have assessments as part of their graduation requirements, but in a much broader form,” she said.

Massachusetts moves

Scruggs said her son took Massachusetts’ required exam last spring; he passed the science and math portions but fell 1 point short in English.

“He could do well in his classes, but if he didn’t pass the three tests, he wouldn’t get his regular diploma,” Scruggs said. “How do you go out into the working world, and you went to school every day and passed your classes, but got no diploma?”

Her son has taken the English test again and is awaiting his new score, she said.

Norton, by contrast, said the exam, called the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, gave her son an incentive to work hard.

“I worry that kids like him … are going to end up graduating from high school without the skills they will need,” Norton said. “Without the test, they will just be passed along. I can’t just trust that my kid is getting the basic level of what he needs. I need a bar set where he will get the level of education he needs.”

Students in Massachusetts still will have to take the MCAS in their sophomore year of high school, and the scores will be used to assess their overall learning. But failing the test won’t be a barrier to graduation beginning with the class of 2025. The state is still debating how — or whether — to replace the MCAS with other types of required courses, evaluations or measurements.

High school students in Massachusetts and most states still have to satisfy other graduation requirements, which usually include four years of English and a number of other core subjects such as mathematics, sciences and social studies. Those requirements vary widely across the country, however, as most are set by individual school districts.

In New York, the State Education Department in 2019 began a multiyear process of rethinking high school graduation requirements and the Regents Exam. The department decided last fall to phase out the exit exam and replace it with something called a “Portrait of a Graduate,” including seven areas of study in which a student must establish proficiency. Credit options include capstone projects, work-based learning experiences and internships, as well as academic achievement. Several other states have moved recently to a similar approach.

Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, an advocacy group that works to limit standardized testing, said course grades do a better job of assessing students’ abilities.

“Standardized tests are poor ways of incentivizing and measuring the kinds of skills and knowledge we should have high school kids focusing on,” Feder said. “You get ‘teaching to the test’ that doesn’t bear much of a relationship to the kinds of things that kids are being asked to do when they go on to college or the workplace.”

Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association union, said phrases such as “teaching to the test” disrespect teachers and their ability to know when students have mastered content and competency. The high school tests are first taken in the 10th grade in Massachusetts. If the kids don’t pass, they can retake the exam in the 11th or 12th grade.

“Educators are still evaluating students,” he said. “It’s a mirage to say that everything that a student does in education can be measured by a standardized test in the 10th grade. Education, of course, goes through the 12th grade.”

He added that course grades are still a good predictor of how much a student knows.

Colorado’s menu

Several of the experts and groups on both sides of the debate point to Colorado as a blueprint for how to move away from graduation test requirements.

Colorado, which made the switch with the graduating class of 2021, now allows school districts to choose from a menu of assessment techniques, such as SAT or ACT scores, or demonstration of workforce readiness in various skill areas.

A state task force created by the legislature recently to the education accreditation system to “better reflect diverse student needs and smaller school populations.” They include creating assessments that adapt to student needs, offering multilingual options, and providing quicker results to understand student progress.

The state hopes the menu of assessment options will support local flexibility, said Danielle Ongart, assistant commissioner for student pathways and engagement at the Colorado Department of Education.

“Depending on what the student wants for themselves, they have the ability to show what they know,” she said in an interview. In particular, she said, the menu allows for industry certificates, if a student knows what type of work they want to do. That includes areas such as computer science or quantum computing.

“It allows students to better understand themselves and explain what they can do, what they are good at, and what they want to do,” she said.

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He won one of 20 available slots in a new —  just one of three at Accenture — in a city of 20,000 public high school students. 

Three years later, Brown-Weaver, now 19, has become a full-time employee, earning more than $20 an hour as a package app developer at Accenture.

But a good friend who missed out on the apprenticeships is struggling. 

“Because of the luck of the draw that I had (I’m working) … in the field that I want to be in,” Brown-Weaver told a recent .

His friend, he said, “works part time at Target, making minimum wage.”

“It’s sad to see that I simply just got lucky that day,” Brown-Weaver said.

Providing high school students like Brown-Weaver a chance to try out possible careers has become a growing focus for families, public officials, schools and even businesses the last several years. 

But all work opportunities aren’t created equal. 

There’s a hierarchy of experiences that rise in commitment, intensity and benefit for students and providers —  with career days and job fairs at the low end. At the top end are internships, where students work with adults; and apprenticeships, longer programs where students are paid to work and earn career credentials.

Schools and communities routinely boast of making great efforts to better connect students with real work opportunities, but the reality is these efforts rarely go beyond career exposure events like career days or job shadows.

“The ultimate internship…a paid experience…we still have a long way to go to provide more opportunity for young people to experience those,” said Julie Lammers, senior vice president of American Student Assistance, a non-profit connecting students to career training.

The best estimates available suggest five percent of students or less have the chance for the gold standard of work experiences —  apprenticeships or internships. 

At the request of ����Ӱ��, the U.S. Department of Labor compiled data showing a little over 10,000 16- to 18-year-olds started apprenticeships nationally last year — less than a tenth of a percent of the more than 13 million students that age. That’s including 18-year-olds who started apprenticeships after graduating high school.

It’s a dramatic difference from European countries such as Switzerland, where more than half of students use apprenticeships to start a career or as a stepping stone to university. Apprenticeships in Switzerland have the attention of Linda McMahon, the new appointee for U.S. secretary of education, who on the day her appointment was announced. 

There are more internships than apprenticeships for high schoolers, but still not many. A 2018 survey of more than 800 students by American Student Assistance, a non-profit that works with students on career choices, showed while 79 percent were interested in trying a work experience, only 2 percent completed an internship in high school.

Though the percentage of employers offering high school internships has, ASA estimates only four to five percent of students actually are participating in internships.

‘That’s still a very small number of young people,” Lammers said. “Those organizations may only be offering one or two opportunities, so the volume is still not there.”

Lammers said schools are instead adding “things that expose young people to work, but are not necessarily training them in specific skills.”

ASA’s recent survey found that close to half of employers offer mentorships, job shadowing, open houses and field trip visits — all valuable experiences for students but that barely scratch the surface of providing  the skills and training needed for the world of work.

Noel Ginsburg, co-chairman of the U.S. Department of Labor’s said schools and businesses can’t stop at just exposing students to careers.

“It’s not a bad thing,” he said. “It’s just not enough.”

“It’s a lack of understanding what quality actually means when a school says, ‘We have these partnerships with XYZ company, and they come in, they’re helping us in class, and sometimes they’ll donate old whatever (equipment to train with),” Ginsburg said. “That’s not what apprenticeship is…but that’s historically what it has been for them.”

Experts have agreed on a rough hierarchy of work experiences for several years, often distinguishing between those where students “learn about work” and those where they “learn how to work.”

As a co-written by Advance CTE, the national association of state directors of career technical education, notes, “Work-based learning includes a continuum of experiences ranging from less intensive opportunities such as career awareness and career exploration to more intensive opportunities such as career preparation and career training.”

The Advance CTE hierarchy below is similar to those created in 2009 like, a Bay Area non-profit that has worked on career efforts in California and New York. It’s also similar to those used by nonprofits like Brookings, ExcelInED, ASA or adopted by states such as , , , or , sometimes labeling the top level as career immersion, development or participation.

Some take that hierarchy even farther. As officials in Indiana started developing plans for a statewide expansion of high school apprenticeships they ranked student work experiences with full registered apprenticeships at the top, pre-apprenticeships and other apprenticeships a level below, internships below those and work opportunities that teach students general employability skills a step lower.

The trouble is that while low-level career experiences like job fairs take just a few hours of time for students and businesses, apprenticeships and internships require much more effort from both sides. 

CityWorks DC, the program that organized Brown-Weaver’s apprenticeship, would like to expand to many more students, but is growing slowly.

“We definitely need more opportunities and hope to offer more, but one reason there are so few are the systemic barriers that make what we do very resource intensive and challenging,” said Lateefah Durant, CityWorks’ vice president of innovation.

She said it can be hard to find students that can commit to working several hours a week and fit that within their high school class schedules. It’s also hard to find companies willing to take on high school students and train them.

In 2019, the program’s first year, one of nine companies that took on apprentices backed out. And one of the other Accenture apprentices alongside Brown-Weaver had trouble meeting standards and was dropped.

ASA’s 2023 survey highlighted several common challenges businesses see as they start high school internships, including finding appropriate work for them, devoting staff to training them, scheduling around class schedules and whether students have transportation to work.

Companies are less likely to view high school apprenticeships as a key part of building a workforce than just as a way to give back to the community. Using apprenticeships and internships as a real talent strategy, as they are in Europe, is key to them ever becoming widely available, experts say.

Those findings are in keeping with challenges experts have pointed to as holding growth of internships and apprenticeships back.

Transportation is a big problem for lower-income students, who often need to improve their career chances the most but rarely have their own car. And class schedules, along with extracurricular activities, can be a big hurdle too since they can limit the time a student can spend in a workplace each day.

Indiana is among states trying to overcome these issues. Transportation costs could be covered by new Career Savings Accounts – state grants to students for training expenses. And the state is considering more flexible class schedules, so students can work at an apprenticeship a few days each week.

In many cases, with few companies stepping up to take on interns or apprenticeships, students are placed instead in government offices or with nonprofits that advocate for work opportunities. The D.C. program has apprentices with the Department of Labor and with New America, a left-leaning think tank that is part of the national Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship.

Indiana also placed early apprentices with Ascend Indiana, a non-profit that helped create them.

Schools and communities also lean on experiences that partly simulate or mirror work experience. These can include students doing exploratory summer internships with industry associations or schools that partner with companies so students earn money by doing a project, such as a small coding or marketing task, through school for the company.

Though there’s no consensus on where these fall on the continuum of work experiences, ASA’s Lammers said they can be worthwhile, if students are working on real-world problems for employers that intend to use the work product.

“If it is high- intensity project based learning, where young people are still exposed to a career…and are able to understand that it’s not just sort of an academic exercise… there is huge value in that,” she said. “It might not just be the nine-to- five paid experience that we sort of see in an internship, and that might be okay.”

Others look to third parties that the field is calling “intermediaries” to navigate some of the complex legal, liability and training issues, as well as to recruit, select and train students, along with training company staff in how to work with teenagers.

In Boston, the city’s Public Industry Council helps run paid summer internships for high schoolers, while also running staff training sessions to make sure students and companies benefit. CareerWise acts as an intermediary on some levels. Genesys Works, a non-profit, fills that role in eight regions — Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Tulsa and Washington, D.C., with Jacksonville coming next year.

Genesys gives students eight-week of unpaid training in the summer after 11th grade before placing them in paid internships for 20 hours a week as seniors. Students are paid employees of Genesys, not the companies, but they work in the offices of companies like Accenture, Medtronic or Target, the latter in corporate offices, not stocking shelves or working a register like Brown-Weaver’s friend.

“We’re going to our corporate partners saying, like, what are the roles, entry level roles in your corporate offices that you are filling over and over again?” said Mandy Hildenbrand, chief services officer of Genesys. “Let’s talk about how we can be a pipeline for that.”

For many apprenticeship advocates, some of the barriers are more about attitudes than real problems. 

“Culturally, U.S. companies haven’t traditionally viewed themselves as a training ground or an extension of the classroom,” said Ginsburg, founder of CareerWise, the nation’s largest youth apprenticeship program. “There’s a big difference between having an intern look over your shoulder and actually expecting real work from an apprentice.”

He said businesses should recognize that while they won’t see immediate returns, they will if they are patient and take the time to train students well.

“It’s hard,” he said, “before it gets easy.”

FORT WORTH — Tiphainne Wright tapped her foot as she flipped through her copy of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the dystopian novel. To be dismissed from class that November day, Wright and her fellow students had to identify a metaphor or motif in that week’s reading.

“I’m never getting out of here,” Wright said, filling in the silence in the room, a nervous smile played on her lips.

Eventually, she thought of an example and jotted it down. She turned it in to her teacher, Mrs. Dory, and received a fist bump.

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The 22-year-old dropped out of high school her junior year after having a baby. She never liked school anyhow. The hectic environment was not conducive to her learning, she said.

She’s trying again, four years later, so she can get a job that will support her and her son.

The flexibility of afternoon and evening classes at her adult high school “gives me extra time to spend with him and encourage him to finish school and push him to be somebody better than I was,” she said.

Wright attends New Heights High School, where adult students like her get a second chance to earn a high school diploma and a training certificate at no cost. The charter high school opened this year out of a Tarrant County College building. The school is part of a statewide effort to help those who dropped out of high school enter the workforce.

Students come to New Heights with a range of academic histories. Their previous high school credits will count toward a diploma — which on average takes about two years to earn and includes workforce training from the junior college.

About one in six Texas adults never finish high school. The main alternative is the General Equivalency Diploma, or GED. But in the past decade.

Not completing high school has reverberations on the wages Texans earn later in life. Adult workers who have a diploma see on average nearly than those who don’t.

New Heights High School sits on the southeast fringes of the North Texas city, past the railroad tracks in a mostly Black, mostly low-income neighborhood called Stop Six. There’s no full-service grocery store, no anchoring place to gather, no major employers.

Dropping out of high school in this neighborhood can feed the cycle of poverty that has had a tight grip on Stop Six families – impeding employment, limiting salaries, and increasing the poverty rate of children.

When New Heights English teacher Schnique Dory was in school, her mom drilled into her that she would not become a part of the problems in the Stop Six neighborhood she saw nearly every day. Today, the streets are still dotted with abandoned houses. Unemployment rates are nearly triple the rest of the city.

Dory was the first person in her family to graduate from college. She has since returned home to teach in Fort Worth and Stop Six.

Teacher Schnique Dory reads from “The Handmaid’s Tale” with her fourth period students at New Heights High School. (Maria Crane/The Texas Tribune)

“Teaching my hood, teaching my community, investing in people who came from where I came, I’m hoping that it’s going to pay back generational change,” she said. “They can all increase their incomes, get better jobs, and have better lives.”

The first modern adult high school was opened 11 years ago. State lawmakers first created an Austin pilot program for 150 learners. About 48 students graduated in the first year, and 61 in the following year, according to the state’s evaluation of the program.

In response, the adult charter high school model was cemented into state law in the following sessions. Lawmakers added guardrails for funding and established accountability metrics relevant to adult learners coming in at a range of reading levels.

Like other charters, these schools receive public funding and do not charge tuition. While they operate outside the traditional school district governing structure, they must meet many of the same state requirements and accountability metrics.

During the most recent legislative session, lawmakers established a way for adult high schools to enter partnerships with nonprofits and community colleges. The Fort Worth school is one of the first adult high schools to team up with a community college, along with the Goodwill Excel Center. These partnerships allow the charter school to access additional funding and offer additional credentials that can be attractive to adults seeking a leg up in their field.

Charter schools across the state are starting to follow suit. An existing charter work network, ResponsiveEd, has already announced they are opening adult high schools in 23 cities across Texas.

Charter school critics say they take money from traditional public schools, which can translate to reduced services for students in the district. The adult model, however, taps a different population of learners, Traci Berry, the CEO of the New Heights argued.

“We’re actually supporting their families,” said Berry, who had had a hand in the lawmaking effort. “And ISDs know that if the parents of their children are doing better, then their children are going to [do] better.”

Gustavo Mora, 36, has tried to get his GED, the high school equivalency test. He’s put time and money into GED programs but the classes in those programs felt too hands-off, Mora said.

“You still have too much space to think and doubt. Am I gonna make this happen? Is this really me?” Mora said. ”It came to a point where I couldn’t really take time out of my day to do education.”

Mora was in high school when he became a father. His high school at the time kicked him out because he was missing too many classes to work full time.

The personalized attention and the traditional classroom setting at New Heights has made this time feel different. He can’t turn around a hallway corner without a teacher checking in on him, he said.

From left: Students Tiphainne Wright, 22, and Gustavo Mora, 36, discuss the day’s reading in class at New Heights High School. The school serves adults who previously dropped out of high school. (Maria Crane/The Texas Tribune)

And this time, he’s been able to make school a priority. The technicians at the auto body shop he owns know to text three times if there’s an emergency on the days he’s in class. He purchased the materials for his class project on “The Handmaid’s Tale” at the Dollar Tree before fixing dinner for his six kids and he finished the project when they were asleep.

“It’s an all-day, everyday thing for me, Monday through Sunday. It’s not a day off,” he said. “I want to be able to show my family, especially my kids, I have graduated.”

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.