"Our best future workforce is the kids in our hallways right now," Craig Barringer, the Sweetwater County School District No. 2 superintendent, said.
Wanting to connect students to employers is one of the district's goals, and being chosen for a new collaboration with the governor's office will help make that goal even more attainable.
SCSD No. 2 was one of nine school districts throughout Wyoming accepted into the RIDE (Reimagining and Innovating the Delivery of Education) Pilot program, which is part of "Wyoming's Future of Learning" - a collaboration between Governor Mark Gordon, Superintendent Megan Degenfelder, the Wyoming Department of Education, the State Board of Education, and the University of Wyoming College of Education. The program is designed to support student-centered learning, according to a press release from the governor's office.
School districts across the state received an email about the program, and 17 districts went through the application process, with the final nine being chosen and announced in July.
As one of the districts chosen for the program, SCSD No. 2 will receive a grant for $37,500, as well as support to develop a new program.
"What we really are looking forward to is working with the RIDE group to develop this program," Barringer said. "So the funding is minimal, but the structure that they can help us provide will make sure that once that grant goes away that we'll be able to continue this project and have success."
The program the district wants to develop will focus on helping Green River High School students, especially seniors, prepare to enter the workforce.
"Our goal is to give kids real, meaningful learning opportunities through career and job training," Barringer explained.
One of the reasons the district wants to focus on preparing students for their careers is because the number of students who work during high school has gone down in the last two decades. Barringer explained that in 2000, 75% of 12th graders had jobs before they graduated. That number has gone down to 51%.
"Half of our kids have never worked for pay, and they're gonna go out into the job market completely unprepared unless we make some changes in getting them ready," Barringer said.
Working with the RIDE program will help the district make these changes by developing a new program to help students learn about what to expect when they start working. The goal is to teach students practical things about having a job, from dress codes to scheduling to daily work. While the program won't send kids to work while they're in school, it will teach them about the expectations of work.
"We're creating the vision of what a job may look like for them, what a career will look like for them," Barringer explained.
While the program is still in the early stages of being developed, and the district will be meeting with RIDE representatives in September to start planning more specifics, Barringer hopes to be able to take students who are interested in specific careers and pair them with local industries and businesses to do things like job shadowing.
Part of making this possible will be continuing to work with the Southwest Wyoming Manufacturing Partnership group. The SWMP was one of the main forces that encouraged the district to apply for the RIDE program, and the group will continue to work with the district to connect them to local employers.
"We will use them as our community connection as far as starting to build the expectations of what our community expects of this program," Barringer said of SWMP.
One of the reasons this is important is it helps toward the goal of developing a local workforce.
"Through lots of research we know that the best employees in rural America grew up in those communities," Barringer noted.
The superintendent also hopes the district will be able to develop the program over the fall semester and be ready to get going with the first cohort of seniors in January.
"We want to try to connect kids with interests they may have for a career beyond school," Barringer said.
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