CAREER PATHS: MAKING BEDS & CLEANING TOILETS
Radio Commentary, 90.7, 91.7 New Life FM, October 12, 2012 – By Sue Ella Deadwyler
Good morning, Jim. If you were tuned to radio station WALB in Albany, Georgia May 11, 2012, you might have heard Lt. Governor Casey Cagle say this, “Corporations were surveyed. 50 percent of them said we have jobs, but we don’t have the skilled workers to meet those jobs. We really need to retool our focus in education. One of those is the college and career academy.”
He went on to say he envisions a day when a student can graduate high school on one Saturday and graduate college on the next Saturday. To do that, high school students will have, simultaneously, received high school and technical college credit, while attending a college and career academy where they become skilled workers businesses say they can’t find.
High school graduates, whose career path courses double as college credit, walk off stage at graduation with a skill certificate, not a high school diploma. The skill certificate means they had on-the-job-training during class time for the job they will begin the day after graduation.
Consider this. On August 23, 2012, that same radio station announced two new teaching labs at Albany Technical College. One new lab has 30 brand new mac books to teach marketing skills. The other new lab opened by the Hotel, Restaurant, and Tourism department of the technical college is fully equipped with hotel-like bedrooms and a fully-furnished kitchen. The head of that department said, “This new renovation gives us a wonderful opportunity to provide hands on training for all of our students here in this hospitality, management program.”
Question: Do children attend high school and college, so they can have careers in making beds, cleaning bathrooms and dusting furniture or, perhaps, manage the facility? I couldn’t help but note how proud the head of the hospitality program was, anticipating how many more students would enroll in college, so they could have life-long jobs cleaning up after tourists.
Beginning in the 2013 – 14 school year, K – 12 students must choose one of 16 career paths to follow until graduation. The career paths are vaguely written, but marketing, sales and service is listed and so is hospitality and tourism, which could mean a management career or making beds and cleaning toilets. Albany Technical College is already training for those careers, because School-to-Work is the new norm in education. For Georgia Insight I’m Sue Ella Deadwyler, your Capitol correspondent.