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Long-form interviews and conversations from Mason County, Washington. Host Jeff Slakey sits down with local leaders, legislators, small business owners, and community voices for unhurried conversations about what's shaping the Hood Canal region — government, education, healthcare, the outdoors, and the people making a difference.
New episodes drop throughout the week. For daily local headlines, subscribe to KMAS Morning News with Jeff Slakey.
Well, as I continue my conversations around the Shelton School District, kind of getting just a better sense of what happens behind the scenes, I am here with, full disclosure, working partners of mine in the CTE department, Gretchen, Wendy, and Ty, and we're going to talk about what I think is one of the most visual but least understood departments in the Shelton School District, and this is CTE Career and Technical Education. Gretchen, you're the director of this for the Shelton School District. Tell me a little bit about what CTE is here at Shelton.
It's really an opportunity for us to partner with students in 7th through 12th grade, staff in our district, and industry partners to create hands-on learning experiences that align both with state standards and what industry partners need as our students graduate and head into their career. This seems to be a department and push that has come on in the last, I don't know, 10 years. People start talking more about this, I would say, as folks are looking at what they're learning in schools and realizing at times there could be a little miscommunication, let's say, between what is in the classroom and what is being worked on in the real world.
Would you agree to something like that? Well, I would say that we used to call it vocational education, right? So back in the day it was home ec and shop and whatever that looked like, the marketing class, whatever that looked like back in the day, and as we evolve in education we coin the term differently, we coin the class differently, but aligning those learning opportunities inside the classroom is just as important today as it has been 25 years ago. But I would agree that in the last 10 years there's been a real push, especially in Washington State, to turn out students in a graduation stance, post-secondary if you will, how can they be most successful regardless of if they go to college or university or they go straight into a career. One of the things here at Shelton School District, at Shelton High School specific, is the introduction over these last few years of the academies and the pathways, and when I talk to people in the public and they kind of are unsure of what that means, it almost is like a collegiate level decision-making process for these students.
They'll come in to high school, and that's where Wendy comes in as kind of the freshman lead on this one. Wendy, you start these students' journey over the next four years to kind of help them learn about themselves and navigate these different pathways and academies that we'll get to, but first tell us how you work with the freshmen to get them prepared to start learning these disciplines. Yeah, so we started the freshman academy, and the cornerstone of that is our freshman seminar class, which is a two-trimester course, and it's really about how do we successfully transition from a junior high school to the high school model.
So a lot of high school 101 type of courses, how do I check my email, how do I communicate electronically, how do I get on to Canvas and things like that, but we also spend a lot of time helping students figure out more about who they are and start thinking about who they want to become in life. I think one of the main points of freshman seminar is that we want to help students be really proactive about how they spend their time and make choices that are going to benefit them, not just in the next three or four years, but for many years to come, and the way we do that is, first of all, we do a lot of introspective lesson planning and activities, so we use a program called uScience, which helps students explore what their natural aptitudes are, skills that they might naturally be good at, like math, for example. Some of us have a natural aptitude towards mathematics, some of us have a natural aptitude towards the arts, and what we do through uScience is that we help frame those things as, sure, you have this natural aptitude for that, and that those skills connect you to a potential career.
It doesn't mean that you'll never be good at these other skills, it just means that you might have to try a little bit harder. So when we move from who am I, what am I already good at, what are the things that I like, we start connecting that to how does this apply to the type of learning that I might have in this high school model where I'm currently at, and that's our academy system, and I think it's important to note that our academy model is based off of our regional needs around our industry. These are skills, career paths that students might have the easiest points of access to within the region, but they can also move outward.
So we go through the process of exploring our academies, we have hands-on experiences where students learn about what are the types of skills and activities that I might do when I'm exploring in this career path, and does that connect and resonate with the aptitudes and interests that I already have and what I might want to do after high school. But what I think we really always want to emphasize to students is that this does not mean this is what you have to do for the rest of your life, and I think that was a little bit of a struggle when we first launched as students were like, well, but now I have to be a doctor? Right. Or now I have to be a mechanic? Like, no, you don't have to do these things, you can do them while you're here and enjoy them, but we really want to emphasize the transferable skills that you gain while you're in these pathways.
So how do the skills that I gain in one class connect to a career path in a different one? And I can talk to that in my own experience of, I have an education background in theater arts and the performance and all sorts of other things that don't directly connect to what I do now today, but so many of those skills immediately translate and elevate the work that I do now in education and event planning and collaborating with teams. So we really want to help students understand that these skills branch out to many different places and they can help them. And then, too, I would say, Gretchen, as the students are moving their time through the high school in these four years, having them kind of key in on some things that they like or have an aptitude for helps keep them engaged in the overall learning process as they move through some of these other disciplines that they may not necessarily have an interest in but need to get fulfilled for graduation requirements.
Absolutely. A traditional English language arts class doesn't always resonate with a student, but when you connect it to reading a manual inside of the auto shop or inside of the manufacturing world, then they can connect the dots and it tends to make them more successful in their English class. Same with math, science, social studies, right, the whole civics engagement piece is incredibly embedded inside of all of career and technical education.
Explain again the different academies that we have here at Shelton High School or just the names of them. Sure. The freshman academy is for all of our ninth graders and that's a required academy.
Students then, in their second trimester of their freshman year, choose which lens they want to finish learning their high school career through. So it's business, finance, hospitality, natural resource academy, manufacturing, engineering, and technology academy, and health science academy. And those, like Wendy was saying, those are modeled on what we have here in the region, or is it a kind of a nationwide model for these kind of overarching ones? That's a good question.
So it's a little bit of both. So career and technical education is modeled by career clusters and that's at a national model. But in the Shelton School District, we have worked incredibly hard with our industry partners to create experiences for our students that can rebound our students back into our community, whether or not they go to university.
So can someone go from the natural resource academy right into Sierra Pacific? Absolutely. Can they go to university and come back to Mason Health? 100%. And that was super intentional by the industry partners and the educators before our time.
Ty, you are kind of the head, the lead there when it comes to business, finance, and hospitality. What do you see when you talk with the industry in Mason County on what is being taught in the classrooms and whether or not what's being taught in the classrooms is what these partners are actually doing on their day-to-day basis? Yeah. For one, the industry partners are a key component to the whole concept of CTE, right? It's the building the bridge, making sure that these students are equipped at each point before they get to 11th and 12th grade when we start placing them with internships into the community with the community partners.
So in the classroom, we target them and the teachers are really the front line with helping us identify and speaking to the students and getting their stories and what their interests are. Then we collect the names and then we start connecting dots. So that's the component that we use in all of the academies.
Even though I'm with the business, finance, and hospitality, we help place students in all of the academies. We're not just mine. And I've been in part of meetings now on both sides of these classes where the teachers will ask for input from the industry partners on what we should be learning or what you should be teaching the students.
And then also here in the other side where the teachers are starting to work on these workflows, how important is it for the community to see in a broad educational sense that the students are learning what is actually going to be happening in industry? I think one thing that has been wonderful, we have embedded our students inside of our bi-annual CTE advisory committee meetings, which are a requirement from the state superintendent. But showcasing what students are doing and giving them a voice at the table has helped bridge the gap between our industry partners and our educators. And it's really important to remember that this work actually doesn't start just at high school.
It starts in seventh grade. And we're creating pathways from seventh grade all the way through 12th grade. And it isn't just happening at Shelton High School.
It's happening all around our district in different ways. Cedar High School, Choice High School, they're both participating in all the freshman academy experiences, as well as their students are coming here to take classes, and we're sharing content and teaching staff, as well as programming. That just creates a bigger, broader voice for what our industry partners are experiencing.
And our industry partners have walked away from those CTE advisory meetings blown away by how amazing our students are, what the students are able to teach the industry partners. And it's really helped facilitate healthy conversations about both the industry-recognized credentials that the students need in order to enter industry, or what's happening in the classroom. Wendy, go ahead.
Well, I just wanted to add to the component of having the CTE teachers, they are from industry. So there is a, again, that was how I was able to do this. That is a crucial component because they're able to connect and communicate with the industry partners in order to make that whole bridge happen because they have to understand the nuances and the little different perspective.
Wendy, as you see the seventh and eighth graders moving into freshman and freshman academy, with kind of these understanding of the pathways and the academies that they'll eventually get into, what do you, how do you anticipate the students being able to get into this, to learning quicker, to be more excited as they start their, what sometimes can be a pretty scary step into high school. But if they already have a little bit of understanding of these different types of pathways, it's kind of, they go, oh, well, at least we're on our way, something like that. Well, I think something that we more intentionally launched this past school year was starting the youth science exploration and career exploration at the seventh and eighth grade level.
So students are already looking at, who am I? How does my mind work? How does that connect to the things that I'm interested in? What does that mean for what I may become later in life? So that's part of the whole high school and beyond plan. It actually starts in junior high. So we start having those conversations with students about what that could mean for you post high school, but also what are opportunities that exist for you in the high school realm that you might be interested in exploring.
And I think that's a really important part to emphasize to students is that it's an exploration, it's not a lifetime commitment. So we have all these CTE courses at the seventh and eighth grade level that we are doing vertical alignment between our high schools and our junior high to ensure that students are learning the foundational skills and that teachers are communicating and collaborating between seventh through twelfth grade to help students be more successful when they come to the high school level. And so they're exploring shop classes, CAD classes, different computer and arts classes that connect to the different things that will happen at a later point in time.
So we're having those conversations earlier on to get them intrigued and motivated. And I think probably the next level to that is start getting our high school students down there in those classrooms too and leading experiences. Last year, we brought several seventh and eighth graders up to have STEM experiences, right? So they explored welding, they explored auto, and that already increased their interest and their excitement about what happens when I get to high school.
I can get into these classes, which is really cool. One thing about CTE that I've come to learn is that these it's a it's considered an elective program. They're kind of the elective.
So you're not discounting Gretchen or taking away the traditional studies that families and parents might have known generationally in high school. There's still math, there's still English, there's still science, but there's these other opportunities to learn. Right, so we're adjacent to the graduation requirements that have been set historically for Washington State.
How many graduation requirements has fluctuated at the state level over the past 20 or more years? Students still need 24 credits to graduate. It's never our intent to take over, but sometimes our classes do have equivalency credit or cross credit with math or science. We have an AEI foundations class that's equivalent to social studies, and we're the only one in the state.
And we did that here in Shelton, and that is an amazing accomplishment. But we're not here to take over social studies. We're just here to complement it and to teach kids that you can learn those skills and those standards through a different method.
But all of the rest of those teachers and the cohorts and the district leaders that align English, math, science, social studies, you name it, they're just as important. And you're correct, we are considered an elective. So we're running by the skin of our teeth during levy season.
We're lucky in Shelton School District that our voters have historically said yes to levies, but we're elective and we will go away if the levy doesn't pass. And again, circling back to kind of what the freshmen are seeing when they first get on campus, this is their opportunities to explore their future pathways. I mean, future employment opportunities.
I said at the onset that this department is one of the most visual outward facing of the district, I would say, but one of maybe the least understood, especially when you say that these are elective classes. Folks have come in over the many, many years, and I say outward facing because you've got such a good buy-in that has been developed over the years for these career fairs and these expos. And community partners take time out of their busy days to come spend a day on campus and engage with these students and learn what they're learning, show off what they're learning.
And on top of that, we in a department, and again, disclosure here, I do work with these folks, but it's a good way to understand better what's happening. This internship model that started in earnest last year in a way to get kids out of the classrooms and hands-on learning, we're just getting ready to wrap up the first session of this school year. But starting last year, Ty, this became a real flashpoint in the community.
People were talking about it all over the place. Yeah, it's a total buy-in though, right, from Gretchen's direction and mission duty upon us, you know, wanting us to fulfill these obligations. We kind of thought we set a low bar, but we killed it.
And then we ended up really catching a really good pace with our community partners buying in, our teachers giving us names of students, our admin allowing us, our partnerships with MTA. We really did our work in networking, I guess is the best way to say that is. It does take a village, and we really put that process together.
And then this year, we started refining it right at the end of last year, and I think we hit the ground running. And now we are with all of the major employers within the Mason County, and we have some really great partnerships, and we're starting, I would say, our second tier of partnerships with other entities that watched last year, and then now are saying, attended our advisory committee meetings, and now are like, we want in. The 20-hour internship model that we developed here in the Shelton School District was based off of a mandate from the state superintendent's office.
It's an option that is a work-based learning indicator, and every CTE class has to be connected to a work-based learning indicator. And we took this internship opportunity and ran with it because we saw the potential that it had with linking students and industry partners. What we've developed here has become so successful that the regional CTE directors, the chamber, the local chambers are really interested in having conversations.
And in the next six weeks, we'll be having some pretty deep conversations about why we run this model, and how we run this model, and we'll be able to showcase even more of the success that our students and our industry partners are having with this. And then during freshman academy, the students are hearing from these juniors and seniors that have gone through this to get them excited about potentially choosing these pathways when it comes time to declare. Yeah, exactly, and I'm glad you brought that up too, because I think that that's a really important piece of when we have our freshman students exploring these academies and pathways, we're always collaborating with our student leaders and our staff members from each program area.
But we found, this is our third year now doing it, we found out really quickly that our freshman students respond really, really well when they hear from their peers about what's exciting about these programs, why they love it, what they get to do when they're a part of it. That's just a matter of circumstance of what it is to be a teenager. Things are sounding a lot cooler when it comes from another teenager as opposed to an adult.
Sure. So it's awesome to have our industry partners present as well. But when they work alongside our student leaders and share that passion with our freshman students, they're more interested in exploring, learning more, asking more questions.
And that's where they end up hearing about things like internships, and field trips, and other really great things that are happening in each program. And it's not only the Shelton High School, right? You've briefly mentioned Choice and Cedar, but then also OBJ. So those other, the other two high schools in the district are also included with that, right? The education.
How are those students that feel more comfortable at those high schools able to get into these types of programs? Into the internship? Either the internship or just being able to take some of those pathway classes that may not be at the other high schools. Choice and Cedar are both practicing what they're calling Working Wednesdays, where they're out in the community, either on their campus or a campus that's connected to them, or with one of our community partners, and they're spending their Wednesday in a practical environment, right? That's what an internship is, is really just a practical environment. We hear that from people all the way through college of, I don't understand how my education is going to lead to something practical.
But Choice and Cedar also have the opportunity, students also have the opportunity to come up to Shelton High School and take a welding class, or an engineering class, or be part of the culinary program. They also have a variety of opportunities. New Market Skill Center is a half-day option where several students go from all three of our high schools, and they run a really great program that is designed for different kind of learning.
But we're not trying to put barriers up in front of students. We're trying to make them most comfortable in the environment that they choose, while giving them as many opportunities as possible. How often are the educational plans, the curriculum, is that get updated from the different meetings that the teachers have with their CTE partners? So in CTE we run, the curriculum that we run is in a framework, which is really it's a unit plan, and that teacher takes the unit plans and breaks them down into lesson plans.
And that's a living document, living breathing document is what we like to say. And the state has mandated a five-year cycle, so every content area is on a required five-year cycle. But that doesn't stop us from dreaming big when we can.
And read, adjusting our programming or our pathways within our academies, we do that on an annual basis. And I rely on the academy coaches to help provide some of that feedback and be kind of that ear from the teacher or the industry partner into our office. Family and consumer science is a content area that we are evaluating this year, and we will scrub all of our frameworks and re-evaluate them and send them back in fresh documents this winter.
What do you see when you are talking with the juniors and the seniors who have gone through, they're about ready to graduate, and maybe they've done an internship, or maybe they just have talked to industry partners at expos, and they realize that what they have been learning these last four years, three, four years, really is getting them prepared for what they want to do next. How does that make, how do you see that the students are reacting to this? I think they're feeling more prepared. I feel like they have options.
But there's still the, you know, my daughter just graduated here a couple years ago. She wasn't sure what she wanted to do. So my personal experience with that was with her is she wanted to have as many options and experiences as she possibly could to make a decision.
Because again, the old model was once you get in that pathway, you're kind of stuck in there. So she loves the opportunity of being able to jump a little bit and have some skill sets that, what do we call them, transferable skills. So she feels more prepared to be able to evaluate, assess, and then be able to make a decision which way she wants to go.
She was going to college for a little bit first, but then she took a break, and now she's working. She's working in the hospitality industry. She's thriving at it.
She didn't realize that was a thing for her. But she mentioned that the ability to understand and learn how to be a professional, learn how to be, even if you don't like the job, right? That's an important thing, is that you can still change your decision, but still be a professional and go into a new career and not burn your bridges. Still utilize these people as your network, still use them as references, and still learn how to be a professional, and it carries over to your next career.
I want to speak to that a little bit more, too, because before I got into my role as an academy coach for our freshman academy, I was working in our visual and performing arts. And I think this is a really important part of CTE as well, is that we have what are called CTSOs, which is the CTE equivalent of an ASB club, right? It's a career technical student organization. And that is a great extended learning opportunity for our students to continue to practice what are workplace readiness skills and what they also believe to be a really fun and exciting environment.
So thinking about drama club, for example, we have so many students that went immediately into the workforce based on the experiences they had through drama club and working with Joey Seward and learning all this audio, video, technical, all these skills in that realm. They were placed into internships, or they went off to college, or some of them are now working for the union and working around the state of Washington, getting involved in events. So I feel like, at least in my experience, I can speak to them, that they felt ready.
They felt prepared to join a professional team. And I think that based on the stories they have shared with me or with our co-workers in that realm, that our industry partners were really surprised that they knew all these things already. And they were really excited about what we're doing here on campus and through our clubs and our activities, as well as within the classroom space, that students are being prepared to actually get into the workforce and be well-received and become an asset to their teams.
We have students that are working at Evergreen College, or we have a student that immediately was hired into a different school district to be their audio, video tech person. Really, really cool stories and experiences of these students going from our programs immediately into the workforce. And that probably helps, too, with the district's push for better graduation rates.
These kids are more engaged. They want to come to school. They want to succeed at the conclusion of their time here.
Absolutely. But also, the industry-recognized credential piece is a really important part of CTE as well. So that's anywhere from food handlers to CPR certification.
Our district is the only district in the state who has successfully tested and provided an industry-recognized credential for the FANUC robot out of our engineering program. That's a really big deal. What does that mean? If you're able to offer these industry-recognized credentials, maybe they get CPR training or they get their food handlers permit, because sometimes those can be financial barriers to students.
If they're outside of the school realm and they go, oh, I've got to take this test or whatever, they might not be able to pay for that test, but it's offered through the educational process here. So that gives them a leg up already. One hundred percent.
And we really try to blanket that through our classes when we align an industry-recognized credentials with all of our advanced classes, or they lead to something really healthy that can be put on their resume. And we as a school district and as a CTE department take that expense on for those students. So the entire family and consumer science pathway is really sitting down and taking a food handlers test.
And we're providing that financial, we're taking away the financial barrier and that opportunity. But we also have done such good work to your point of, you know, we have a really big footprint and not everybody knows about us, but we've attracted attention from the WIAA and the State Board of Ed. They've all been out here working with us in a variety of partnerships, and that's a really big deal for a mid-sized district.
Yeah, the push on CTE from the state superintendent and the state legislature over these last couple years, it's really kind of seemed apparent to me when I talked to our 35th district legislators that this is a, this is kind of the next wave, the current way to really keep these kids engaged and get them ready for a Washington workforce. You know, where so many people are leaving the state perhaps, or they're having a hard time attracting people to come in and work some of these jobs. If the high schools, the districts across the state can take this model where you're kind of getting yourself, you know, slowly on the on-ramp, like you said, Wendy, you're not necessarily locked in.
You can change. It's not like college where all of a sudden you want to change your major and you have to take all these millions of classes again. And thousands of dollars of debt.
Yeah, right. You're slowly getting on the on-ramp to becoming what the state is needing when it's forecasting some of the deficiencies for its employment outlook over these next 10 years or whatever. The seeds are being planted now in seventh and eighth grade, which is pretty fascinating.
So whether or not you remember these classes as home ec or shop or whatever, CTE is kind of the new nomenclature for career and technical education. And Ty mentioned transferable skills. You may also remember that as called soft skills that people will say.
Don't say that. I know, you know, times change, but people remember those ways of speaking about these types of eye contact, handshakes, business professionalism. So it all still is being taught, especially here in the Shelton School District.
It's just sometimes they, you know, change the names, updated for new generations and things like that. So again, working with these folks and seeing the outcomes based on the graduations and the internships and the excitement that these students have had over these few years, it's pretty exciting. So again, if you're listening to this and you're a business owner, especially in the Shelton School District or in Mason County, and you want to get involved in helping lesson plan the next set of your employees, you know, CTE is where you start on this.
And the staff in this department are very motivated to make sure that all the voices of the community partners are heard. So we have this, so many of these dinners and meetings and academy meetings. So it is really a good opportunity.
And I'll put the links on where you can find more about these academies in the show notes here. But again, Gretchen, Wendy, Ty, a small part of what is a big operation, getting these kids really ready for what is being taught out there in the real world after graduation. So thank you very much for some time.