A pathway to success

Casa Grande High School this past school year launched a new career readiness course for freshmen that educators said represents the next step in their goal of preparing students for the working world.

The course, “Success 101,” dovetails with other career education efforts at Casa Grande by exposing students to a semester-long job-planning curriculum early in their high school experience, said Assistant Principal Eric Backman, the administrator who pushed to bring the course to Petaluma. Students later transition into one of four career pathways already in place at Casa Grande.

Notable for Success 101 is the pragmatism and intensity of its curriculum, which employs real-world job market data to ultimately generate a realistic 10-year career plan tailored for each student’s personal interests.

“It’s not just what you want to do, but it’s how to get there,” Backman said.

Based on a course developed by Carpinteria High School in Southern California, Success 101 became one of four electives offered to Casa Grande freshmen in the 2014-15 school year. Around half of the school’s 480 freshmen opted to take the course in its inaugural year, Backman said.

The three-phase curriculum requires students to analyze their interests and goals before transitioning to the brass tacks of a particular career plan, said Amy Hendricks, one of two instructors.

Her students had already settled on a career goal in a recent session held in the final weeks of the semester, along with a list of prerequisites like a certain college degree. It had been a meticulous process involving weeks of exercises and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with much of the course building to that singular accomplishment.

The topic of the day, reflecting a challenge many workers face in an economy that always carries some element of uncertainty, was backup plans.

One student 14-year-old Oscar Diaz, was busy in a computer-led exercise that highlighted jobs with similar requirements to becoming a wildlife biologist. He said he was unswayed, still drawn to the idea of field work involving animals.

“That’s what I’m into,” he said.

Another student, 15-year-old Senia Gallegos, said she remained interested in becoming a police officer but had learned much about the rigors of the job over the course of Success 101. She said she would be keeping her list of backups in mind.

“It’s a hard job. There are a lot of hours,” she said.

Hendricks, who also advocated for bringing the course to Casa Grande, described how these experiences would build to a mock interview. Students would be able to review their 10-year plan throughout high school, with the hope that many would keep the concept in mind.

“Ideally, this is when we want people to start thinking about it, so they don’t get to their senior year and think, ‘What do I do?,’” Hendricks said.

Around half of the incoming freshman class of 500 students is already signed up for the second year of Success 101 during the 2015-16 school year, said Backman.

The school has a history of career-focused education initiatives, highlighted by a $1.25 million dollar federal grant in 2007 to support the development of career pathway programs over the course of five years. The school also benefited from $22 million in additional federal funding allocated across the North Bay in 2014 as part of the Northern California Career Pathways Alliance, Bachman said.

Students are currently able to select from among four pathways in their junior and senior year, focused on areas like careers in health care and marketing. Success 101 is seen as an initiation into those later programs for students and, citing success in the first year’s trial run, a candidate for future implementation as a graduation requirement, Backman said.

“It’s not the economy our parents grew up in,” he said.

(Contact Eric Gneckow at eric.gneckow@arguscouri er.com.)