SPRINGDALE : JAG’s mission to keep teens learning
Posted on Monday, September 24, 2007
Springdale High School senior Amber Jones spends half her day in traditional academic classes such as anatomy, calculus, literature and history.
The rest of her school day is unusual.
Jones leaves the campus at 1 p.m. daily to work the front desk at a local dry cleaner. She earns a grade and elective credit, while pocketing a paycheck she uses for food, cell phone bills and car payments.
Jones, one of about 90 Springdale students deemed at risk of dropping out, is enrolled in the state’s Jobs for Arkansas’ Graduates program, known as JAG.
High school juniors and seniors earn academic credit for working.
They get job and life-skills training in the classroom, and then they’re monitored for one year after graduation to ensure they’re doing something productive. State officials said career and technical education programs are growing in Arkansas as educators strive to prevent dropouts by making high school more relevant for teenagers.
DROPOUT RATE TOO HIGH Reducing the high school dropout rate is one of the country’s biggest challenges.
A June report from the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects and analyzes data for the U. S. Department of Education, said 4 percent of high school students dropped out between October 2004 and October 2005, or 414, 000 dropouts.
The 2005 “One-Third of a Nation” report by Educational Testing Service said about 30 percent of students are failing to complete high school. The same report put Arkansas’ high school completion rate at 73 percent in 2000. Educational Testing Service is a nonprofit research organization based in Princeton, N. J.
Jay Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, said the dropout rate is too high.
Greene said the extent of dropouts is difficult to pin down, because states define it differently using obscure methods and schools often put out misleading data.
For example, he said, Texas used to exempt from its calculations students who were sentenced to prison or dropped out to join the military.
“Schools are strongly disinclined to find out what their dropout rates are precisely,” he said. “It requires them to expend energy to do so, and [the information ] is embarrassing.” MAKING LEARNING RELEVANT Many educators praise career and technical education programs such as Jobs for Arkansas ’ Graduates as a way to reduce the dropout rate, particularly for atrisk students.
A 2005 study from the Minnesota-based National Research Center for Career and Technical Education found that the likelihood of dropping out decreases for students enrolled in vocational programs when they start high school at a traditional age.
James Stone, director of the center, said such programs make learning more relevant for students, thereby encouraging them to stay in school.
“The high school experience needs to include the kind of course work that encourages students to show up next Monday,” he said.
Arkansas schools are buying into the philosophy that career and technical education keeps teenagers in school, said John Davidson, deputy director of the Arkansas Department of Workforce Education Career and Technical Education Division.
Arkansas schools offer 255 different vocational programs, and schools add an average of 200 new vocational classes each year, Davidson said. In June, the workforce education department released findings of a five-year study that showed about 75 percent of Arkansas students from the seventh through 12 th grades take career and technical education classes. About 40 percent of all graduating seniors finish a program of study in a vocational cluster such as auto mechanics or health care each year.
SMART CORE Arkansas isn’t following the national trend in career and technical education, however. According to the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education, the average number of vocational credits a high school student earns declined from 4. 4 in 1982 to 3. 5 in 2004.
Stone blames the decrease on the increased emphasis on testing and the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Schools are requiring students to take more academic courses in the hope that it will increase test scores, Stone said, often at the expense of vocational offerings.
In Arkansas last year, state officials launched a massive public awareness campaign pushing students to take the Smart Core during high school.
Smart Core is a track of classes that includes additional math and science courses. The class of 2010 will be the first Arkansas senior group that must take Smart Core barring parental permission to opt out.
Greene said other educators believe career and technical education programs pigeonhole students along class and racial lines.
“If guidance counselors put low-income students and minorities in career and ‘tech ed’ even if they’re capable of [more ], it then deprives them of college opportunities and greater choices in life,” he said. ‘CAREER ACADEMY’ CONCEPT The Springdale district hasn’t shied from career and technical education programs.
Springdale High, for example, offers the Jobs for Arkansas’ Graduates program along with a course catalogue full of classes that can earn students certification in vocational fields upon graduation, said Don Love, assistant superintendent for curriculum and secondary instruction.
The school is even organized around the “career academy” concept, where students choose the equivalent of a college major and then take classes complementing their interests.
The school’s offerings are all about keeping students engaged and coming to school, Love said, with Jobs for Arkansas’ Graduates being the centerpiece of that effort.
Springdale’s program boasts at least a 90 percent “positive outcome rate” every year, said Sherrie James, one of the school’s two Jobs for Arkansas’ Graduates teachers. A “positive outcome” means not only that the student graduates, but goes on to either get a job, enroll in a postsecondary school or join the military.
Statewide, the rate is 84 percent, said Dennis Butler, a Jobs for Arkansas’ Graduates coordinator in Batesville.
Schools are noticing the program works, Butler said. Jobs for Arkansas’ Graduates has spread from three high schools in 2000 to nearly 40 today.
In Northwest Arkansas, there are programs in Farmington, Gentry, Greenwood, Van Buren, Fort Smith and Ozark. Har-Ber High in Springdale hopes to add a program next year. The Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts also have such programs.
Other high schools offer similar work for credit programs. Bentonville, Rogers and Fayetteville all let some students leave early to work.
STUDENT TESTIMONY James has 13 students in her Tuesday morning job and lifeskills class. Some of the students are in the program because they come from poor families. Others failed classes or started missing them. Some are pregnant. The students learn things like how to create a resume, fill out a job application and dress for an interview. They also get daily prodding to stay on top of homework and attendance in other classes. “It’s like having your mother with you in class every day,” James said.
James also helps students get jobs that align with their career interests and then monitors their work performance.
They receive “On the Job Training” grades each semester.
Senior Kim Carter leaves school at 2 p.m. to work as a fastfood cashier at a local mall.
She works about 20 hours a week and uses her earnings to buy essentials like food and clothing.
Carter’s house burned last year, and the family has since struggled financially.
Carter said she couldn’t afford to stay in school without the program. Vincent King, who graduated from Springdale High in May, tells a similar story. Raised by a single mother who struggled to make ends meet, Jackson moved out at the start of his senior year when he turned 18. He got a full-time job, rented an apartment and paid bills while juggling his senior year of high school. Jobs for Arkansas’ Graduates allowed him to leave school three periods early to go to work. “If I wasn’t in the JAG program, I would have had to drop out,” he said.
To contact this reporter: jkrupa@arkansasonline. com
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