There was a time when Cassian Fernandez thought they wouldn’t make it. They were struggling with their mental health and falling grades.
“I was planning on dropping out,” said Fernandez, who uses they/them pronouns. “I’m honestly surprised I’m still alive.”
Their school at the time didn’t have the resources to help, they said.
But then they transferred to George Washington High, an alternative school in the Ogden City School District. It was relatively small, with just a couple hundred students, and had social workers on hand.
Plus last year, it launched a new program to help students get some work experience before graduating.
Fernandez was one of the first students who started training for their Certified Nursing Assistant license. Twice a week during the school year, they got a ride a few miles away to Ogden-Weber Technical College, where they would learn the fundamentals of nursing.
A typical day might involve practicing patient care skills, like checking vital signs or brushing the teeth of Mrs. Carter, an elderly manikin. Or students might read about different health conditions and how to treat them.
“This is the doorway into health care,” said Diane Sorenson, O-Tech’s nursing program coordinator. “The beauty of them starting in high school is that this college education costs them nothing. And so, say you become a nursing assistant while you're a junior or a senior in high school, and then you decide, ‘Hey, this really isn't for me.’ I mean, you haven't invested anything.“
On the other hand, if a student does like it, a CNA certification will not only lead to jobs in hospitals or care facilities, but it’s a stepping stone to becoming a Licensed Practical Nurse, a Registered Nurse, all the way up to a master’s or even a doctorate in nursing.
It’s one of the few areas where each level of education ‘stacks’ cleanly into the next, whether students start in high school, a technical college or university. In fact, nursing is one of the longest-running examples of stackable pathways in the state, often cited as the model for how such programs should work.
More importantly for Fernandez, they said it’s shown them they have options in life. They completed the program this year and hope to continue their training.
“I was given this huge, bright light of hope where I needed it the most,” Fernandez said. “I feel like I'm able to get back onto my feet and go where I was always hoping I could go.”
An Urgency to Change
Courses like this CNA program aren’t new in Utah. The state has long offered career and technical education. Taking at least one CTE credit is required to graduate high school.
But many educators now see it as an increasingly important tool, both to update a system geared almost exclusively toward preparing students for college and to reignite students’ interest with hands-on learning.
Sandi Hemmert, a longtime CTE coordinator with the Granite School District, said the pandemic accelerated a concerning trend of student apathy. Anecdotally, she said more students seem uninterested in school. Meanwhile, attendance has dropped since 2019 and the rate of chronically absent students has risen from nearly 11% in 2012 to more than 27% in 2022.
“Kids are demanding to know why they're sitting there,” Hemmert said. “And it's especially the kids who don't like school. You know, kids opt out of math and science by second, third grade. And so if we don't do something to connect it, the kids won’t keep going.”
Hemmert said CTE can be that connection, providing a way for students to learn new skills in a real-world setting and showing them how it will help them in the future.
Utah data show that 97% of students who take a year and a half of CTE classes graduate high school, compared to 88% of the overall population. However, among CTE students, less than half reach that year-and-a-half mark. Even fewer — 16% — reach the next level, which could be the equivalent of an industry-recognized certificate.
Not all students in the state have access to a full menu of CTE options, and Hemmert said it can be a challenge getting students involved. Many choose classes based on what their friends do. Others, who have to work while in school, may be focusing more on their jobs than classes. Parents and even school counselors also don’t seem to understand the opportunities and still often push college prep over technical education, she said.
“We've got to shift thinking, and so that's a big portion of what we're doing,” she said.
Granite is a large, urban district, and already has things like a life science incubator, where students can work with startup companies, and a flight simulator for aspiring pilots.
The options are growing though, particularly as labor shortages drive more companies to partner with schools. Hemmert said the district recently launched a pilot apprenticeship program in machining and there is talk about creating similar opportunities in teaching and health care.
The state is also looking to capitalize on the interest with its Adopt-A-School initiative, where schools and businesses can apply to partner with each other based on common goals. Hemmert said it’s critical to get industry involved because they can help inform the curriculum based on what skills are required.
A More Focused Approach
Still, some school leaders think more is needed, such as starting career exploration earlier and making it a bigger piece of graduation requirements.
Both are happening at the Career Academy of Utah, a new online charter school authorized by Utah State University. It launched last September with grades K-8 and is expanding into 9th grade this coming year, followed by grades 10-12 each consecutive year after.
Starting in elementary school, students go on field trips and see presentations about different career paths, according to Executive Director Bonita Teasley. But to graduate from the high school, students are required to choose a focus area and take at least three career courses. Ideally, they’d do an additional internship or capstone project, too.
“I'm old school in that I remember when it was called vocational education,” Teasley said. “It was considered a watered-down approach towards education. Now you're talking about a field in robotics, advanced manufacturing. It's more hands-on, it's more technology focused.”
Teasley said her students must still meet all of the usual academic standards required by the state in addition to the career components.
The school’s board is made up of representatives from four of the state’s major industries: health sciences, manufacturing, mining and oil and gas. The school is most focused on positions related to those fields, Teasley said. But students can also choose a different path, so long as it’s offered at one of the state’s eight technical colleges.
An Attractive Option
The career focus, combined with the flexibility of online school, caught the attention of parent Laura Bebout. She enrolled her two sons, 8-year-old Curtis and 10-year-old Keith, last year.
On a recent trip to the Hill Aerospace Museum, the kids’ eyes lit up as they approached a stealth bomber from the 1980s. It is one of many summer activities Bebout had planned for her kids. They’re also learning how to fish and grow vegetables at the Ogden Community Garden.
Bebout wants her kids to love learning but worried the typical classroom can be a little too structured and can make education feel like a chore.
“I feel like the traditional model mostly focuses on test scores,” she said. “It’s like a bell schedule, and then you all walk in a line and you get a piece of candy.”
She’s not against traditional public schools and had a positive experience when her kids attended one, but she still wanted to try something new. After weeks of research, she settled on the Career Academy.
“You're like, ’Am I doing the right thing to do this?’” she said. ”Since it is so new, it's hard to understand the outcome of it all. But I believe it's going to be amazing.”
Teasley hopes so too. The Career Academy had a slow start; just 64 kids attended as of October 2022, when state enrollment is counted. She said she expects more to come in the next few years and thinks if they stay, the career exposure they’ll get will give them a leg up over everyone else, whether they go to college or not.
This story was produced as part of the Higher Education Media Fellowship. The Fellowship supports reporting on career and technical education. It is administered by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars and funded by the ECMC Foundation.
