College and Career Readiness Connects Students to Success
Date: 11/15/2021
Author: Sheldon Reber
Healdsburg Junior High School students work on a Switch electric vehicle.
A new path to help students realize their goals after high school is offered by a team of educators at the Sonoma County Office of Education. With an innovative ethos, College and Career Readiness serves career readiness and career technical education providers with resources, support, and program development expertise so that students gain the skills and confidence to succeed in life.
According to Jessica Progulske, College & Career Readiness lead in SCOE’s Educational Support Services Department, the catalyst for changing the direction of career and technical education was the 2020-21 Youth Truth survey.
“The local Youth Truth survey collected responses from 13,000 students on topics like academic challenges, school culture, and social and emotional needs,” said Progulske.
The feedback pointed to students feeling overwhelmed with a sense of not being ready for college and a career.
What are the aspects of readiness? “It’s everything from a student’s personal plan for their future that matters to them, to technical support and training, to wraparound social and emotional support that helps them succeed to get to where they’re going,” said Progulske.
To support the change in direction, the recent Sonoma County Portrait of a Graduate initiative included interviews and input from more than 1,000 community members.
“They identified a half dozen attributes and skills that young people need to master to be ready,” said Chuck Wade, SCOE’s College and Career Readiness Lead. “Somewhat to our surprise, those things didn’t include technical skills. We heard very clearly, even from our largest employers in the county, that they need K-12 educators to focus on developing human qualities in their students like being able to collaborate well, communicate well, to be curious, be empathetic, and have a sense of ethics.”
Progulske points out that the shift from career technical education to college and career readiness doesn’t mean abandoning technical education.
“Historically in our community and elsewhere there has been an either or path after high school — college or career,” said Progulske. “Even if we are supporting college-bound students well, they will want a career, too. We want to make sure every option is open to each student based on what they want.”
The team is ready to help district administrators make sense of the complexities and challenges of College and Career Readiness, take best advantage of the opportunities for students, and understand the shifts in how funding for the program works.
“We’ve also developed support for educators and counselors in how to provide relevant learning opportunities for students that incorporate high quality workplace learning experiences,” said Wade. “Sometimes offering these opportunities is logistically challenging for districts as it requires a lot of outreach and connection to community partners — we expect to do a lot of work around that.”
Wade and Progulske look forward to facilitating whole faculty conversations about the pathways educators want to develop for young people that will give them an opportunity to stay in Sonoma County and develop skills that will help them thrive.
“That’s an important conversation we want to support each district in having and thinking about,” said Wade.
The College and Career Readiness team expects to launch a new website in January which will include support, resources, and videos. For more information contact Chuck Wade at cwade@scoe.org and Jessica Progulske at jprogulske@scoe.org.
