Hi, I'm Jeff Rea, your host for Economic Outlook.

Welcome to our show.

We help you make plans each week to join us as we discuss the region's most important economic development initiatives.

Schools in the region are meeting to see how to best deliver career and technical education training.

Could a new career center be in the works for the largest county in Indiana without one?

Stay tuned for that answer to that question and more about why CTE training is so important.

Coming up on economic outlook.

Industries are changing rapidly and the skills required for the jobs of today and tomorrow are different than ever before.

Schools have the challenge of preparing students for success in their careers, and one way they're doing that is through career and technical education training.

We're diving deeper into that today and talking about what's ahead with Kareemah Fowler, the CFO at the South Bend Community School Corporation, and Andrew Wiand, the executive director of enFocus.

Guys, welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, we've got a great conversation.

We'll talk a little bit about preparing students for the future.

And so Kareemah before we start, just help give us a little feel for South Bend Community School Corporation, people obviously have heard of.

They're familiar with it.

Tell us a little bit about it first.

Sure.

So South Bend School Corporation.

Right now we have about 15,400 students.

We have about 30 buildings in our portfolio.

24 of those buildings are school buildings.

We have very robust programing.

We have a pre-K starting at three, going all the way up to 12.

We have career and tech programs, very robust programing throughout the corporation, including getting your associate's degree in 12th grade.

Great.

Sounds good.

And Andrew, come your way so somebody is not familiar with enFocus.

Tell us a little bit about what enFocus is.

Sure.

Thanks, Jeff, and happy to be here with you and Kareemah Yeah.

So enFocus is a ten year old nonprofit in town.

Our mission is to empower talent to build a stronger community.

So really what we do is attract recent graduates to come live, work and play in the area.

But we perform projects and services for civic organizations, manufacturing organizations.

And I really do support the entrepreneurial sector as well.

Great Kareemah to come back your way.

So as you talk about, you know, sort of educating everybody from pre-K all the way through graduate and associate's degree, current technical education is an important piece of that.

You mentioned you have some Talk a little bit about how you do career and technical education training.

Now, before we get into sort of what the future might look like.

Sure.

So we have magnet programs right now, and so we have career in tech in every single high school.

And we just recently received a grant where we're going a little bit further and we're starting to introduce that in the middle school.

But right now we have concentration.

So Riley High School, they focus on medical.

It's a medical magnet, so our career in tech is there.

And then Riley High School is an engineering magnet.

So we do radio engineering at Riley.

And then, uh, Adam's.

There's some basic construction at Adam's and Clay, where they do a lot of shop, put work in automotive.

So those are in Clay high school right now.

And some at Adam's great.

Andrew As we think about enFocus a little bit, you, you and your team have dove into career technical education training.

You know, can you give us just a little state of, you know, sort of what you see, what people are doing in this space these days?

Sure.

And so there's been a trend you know, across the state and beyond to kind of centralize some of this curriculum maybe in one facility and then allows for more expanded pathways, more coursework and things that can be offered maybe at individual schools.

And so as we consider maybe what a hub or one central facility looks like, you're able to add coursework and more experiential learning pathways and connections with employers.

So as we think about things that we might aspire to do in a career and technical education center, you imagine an engineering programs, health science programs where manufacturing programs are now co-located, and that allows for students to experience multiple programs, and it allows for really a single point for employer interactions as well.

So we're seeing a lot of different types of centers across the state and beyond, centralize that programing and really be a benefit to the corporations in the districts that they serve.

So Kareemah come your way because it's so South Bend began thinking about it.

Obviously, some great programing in each of the high schools, as you mentioned, health at Washington Engineering and and such that Riley, Clay Adams all have some great stuff.

You began thinking about something different.

And as I remember even going back to the referendum discussion, we talked about, you, could there be this central hub?

Talk a little bit about the thinking that kind of led to this thought that what if what if we tried to centralize some of these services?

Yes, actually, a lot of that was what they're doing down state with career pathways.

And they're really pushing us in terms of they've redirected how we do our curriculum for career pathway pathways and they have expanded that.

But also looking at the community need.

This really, really came to the forefront, like you said, during referendum time.

We took we went out in the field and gathered a lot of information by way of town hall surveys, you name it.

And it was just a recurring theme.

It it from the business community, you know, the regular parent.

I mean, everyone said that was the one thing that we can all agree on.

They're like, we got to figure something out for career pathways.

And I guess most of the community, they recognize how much of an impact it can have on the students and the community in their community.

So so I think about jobs changing really fast, right?

The careers, the technical expectations, the things.

So so talk about just preparing students this day and age.

How do you get them ready for for the jobs that they that may not even be around yet?

Well, well, sure.

And, you know, you really need to look at what what the occupational outlook might be over the five or ten years.

And there's a lot of need for these technical occupations and employers today.

And in discussions that we've had throughout the process, maybe train on the job or expect some of those skills native when they like are looking for their hires to really feel their business.

And so as you think about career and technical education, providing more hands on learning to be able to learn those trades or learn those techniques directly within our schools provides really a skills benefit and a leg up for those students entering the workforce.

Day one.

Right.

Kareemah come your way because so South Bend has been thinking about this, but obviously all school corporations are contemplating how do we deliver career and technical education training.

But talk about the coalition that maybe has come together to think about what career and technical education training should look like in the future.

Yes.

So there's been a lot of conversation.

So when we began to talk about it, it's like maybe it's very multifaceted.

So we started at a lower level of conversation in the corporation around project based learning.

What does that look like?

Because we are we are also trying to figure out how do we reach and teach students.

So that's a really big thing.

And then how do we align that?

How do we align those feeders and pathways together so that once they get to a certain point, they know exactly what those opportunities are?

So those were a lot of internal conversations within external conversations.

There's been a coalition of people.

I first reached out to Jeff Rea here and said, What's your thoughts on some of this stuff?

I heard a conversation that you had talking about industry and where industry was going, and while that was happening, there was also a parallel of working on our facilities.

So on overall plan for South Bend schools, we knew that career in tech had to be at the center.

So what does that look like?

So engaged our local chamber and said, Hey, what do you think about this?

Our local chamber was excited to look into it more.

He was already having conversations about what this could look like and we reached out to other schools and said, Hey, what do you guys think about this?

We also had to look at our own portfolio and what we were doing, and we recognized that in our restructuring.

Bringing everything together in one location would be a much better option.

But we thought about how can we make this experience a really good experience not only for our students but for our region, and do something that has long lasting impact that could live way beyond us.

And so we expanded that reach and it kind of took on a life all of its own.

And yeah, so, you know, it's been exciting to know that South Bend the Phm, that Mishawaka, the Career Academy, all have been at this table, the private parochial schools as well, too.

And I think that's what I appreciate about this, you know, with this interest of like, how do we how do we best give kids the opportunities they need to prepare them for success so Andrew come your way.

So, so early on in this process, the decision is made to bring enFocus in.

Talk to us a little bit enFocus' role and some of the things that you've brought to the table in this thinking about developing a central hub.

Sure.

And so to Kareemah's point I mean, there's a variety of stakeholders involved in coordinating a plan at this size and totality for the entire county.

And so we consider our role as supporting the districts at bringing their best plans to the table and synthesizing.

And so our role has been to collect information from each participating school corporation.

What programs do you offer?

What would you see of benefit to advance your programing for your students in one consolidated center?

At the same time, talking amongst the employers, what are the jobs of the future?

What would this be most beneficial?

With support from the Chamber and others at some of the the introductions.

But really, our role has been to facilitate group planning.

So there are a variety of school officials all sitting at the table, meeting with regular cadence, discussing location programing, how this would work financially, who governs the programs, how would the instructors be overall organized and coordinated?

And to work through each one of those topics together has strengthened the county wide potential for this program in a very novel way.

The collaboration between the districts towards one common purpose, I think has been very, very exciting.

And so we have, I would say, led and very much supported the process of defining those and then sharing them across the districts to formalize a final plan for this.

And to your point, this is in St. Joe County District seven City District is the largest district in the state without a career hub.

And so there's been interest from a period of years to develop this.

Best way to do is bring everybody together and work a common process to define the overall plan.

Great.

Because we're to take a break here in the studio.

We're gonna go out into the field.

George Lepeniotis, my co-host, is out to take give us a closer look at career and technical education and the need in the community.

George, let me toss it to you.

Thanks, Jeff.

I'm back in high school and specifically I'm in Penn High School here in Mishawaka.

I'm joined by Assistant Principal Josiah Parker.

Jaci, thanks for being with me.

Thank you for coming in to the principal's office today.

But hopefully I'm a bad guy.

So we are in your one of your machine labs and what we've been talking about today.

And and the reason we ask you to join us is the career Academy and what that means.

I know you're on the board for the Career Academy.

You're participating in a multidistrict conversations about what the South Bend Career Academy might look like.

Can you tell us a little bit about a career academy and what is it?

Yeah, it's just been great being a part of the Academy.

It's been a very collaborative group with individuals from all the school districts in our area, the regional Chamber, enFocus.

So Career Center is really a place for students can go get some specific technical skills that will prepare them for whatever's next.

So some kids will be prepared to go right into the workforce with some type of certifications.

Others will be prepared for a two year technical degree and even on to a four year college degree.

So as you participate in the efforts to plan for a new advanced, latest, greatest career center, we are standing in what is an existing version of a career center here at Penn High School that you are largely responsible for.

You oversee as the assistant principal.

Tell us a little bit about the CTE program, as you call it.

First off, what is CTE?

CTE is career and technical education.

So it's those courses that fall within a career related sequence.

So it includes things like manufacturing, construction, culinary arts, business, health sciences, health care, a few other places.

But that's kind of your CTE, your career and technical education and Penn High School's program is also quite as broad, right?

And includes some facilities like the one we're standing in.

Yeah, this is our manufacturing robotics lab.

So we teach courses kind of in those fields.

We have construction labs, so it's our construction and some of our civil work.

We have culinary labs for cooking, We have child development, computer science businesses, several around the school.

And the aim, as you mentioned earlier, is to graduate high school students who have additional skill sets that will help them along the path of whatever their chosen technical career might be at that.

But let's think about that.

So that requires a person to make a decision fairly early on what they might want to do in life.

It does, but one of the benefits we see is even if a student doesn't go into that field, typically the certifications or the experiences they have are going to help them in whatever they go into.

And you'll know if a kid is interested in, say, a culinary, they're probably going to something that may be connected to that or they're going to use those skills.

And you mentioned before we went on air something about, for instance, one of the programs you teach here are is OSHA training.

You know, we all know that OSHA is a big part of occupational safety and health, and that probably applies to many districts.

So is that is that one of the benefits that you really see from the CTE program, even if one if a child makes a different choice later on down the line?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we see it really builds and helps students no matter what.

So as I'm looking around here, I'm curious.

These look very complicated, these machines.

How is it that your faculty and staff come about the skills to be able to teach, for instance, the CMC Haas machine?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So we have more than 20 teachers at the high school that teach career and technical education type courses.

All of them have degrees from college that prepared them for that.

Some of them have degrees from the workforce or experience from the workforce that taught them that.

So they've all been there and done that.

Use the equipment, use the software, the systems.

They're very, very well versed in it.

As the kids go through the program, is there an expectation that they're actually producing things?

And I know we've you know, a couple of seasons ago we did an episode on the Robotics lab, and that's part of the CTE program.

You're right.

Yes, it is.

And we saw actual functioning robots.

I believe some of your kids are at nationals right now, right now down in Houston.

So that's exciting.

Good luck to them.

Is the expectation that there is some product that's actually being made?

There's always going to be product made in almost all of our courses, whether that product is a physical piece that's been manufactured on these machines, you know, a food that's been created in a culinary class or a website, it's been created by business students all of the city.

That's one of the things that really separates CTE from many other courses is there is a lot of those kind of tangible things students are creating.

Yeah, yeah, a lot different than just a textbook this.

So just as you think about a new career center and you're part of that vision development process, what are, what's the next generation of these types of programs look like?

What's up and coming?

MM That's so exciting.

What's coming?

I think it's so we don't even know yet.

I mean, there are things that we are going to prepare students for that don't exist right now.

So the best thing we can do is prepare them for the things we do have and we do know and then give them the skills to learn new things.

So more of the manufacturing is going to be automated more.

Probably a lot of things are going to be automated.

Artificial intelligence that's going to start playing a role in some things.

It's the chat GPT that could really change the business world.

So give them the tools and let them go figure out what's next.

Right.

Josiah, thanks for being with us.

Thanks for letting me on campus and showing us around.

Great place.

Jeff, back to you in the studio where I'm sure you've got a lot more to talk about with technical education and how we are preparing today's kids for tomorrow's very bright but complex future.

George, thank you.

Appreciate the addition to our great conversation we're having here in the studio.

Guys, as we come back.

You know, Andrew, I'm an old guy and and I and it's been a long time since I've been in school and but CTE means different things than it did years ago when I was in school.

So.

So talk a little bit about what CTE is, you know, some of the programing, maybe even it's part of that?

Well, I think there's two ways to answer that.

One is CTE in terms of what it means for the future experiences for students.

It is a great occupational pathway to follow and there are students that take courses that do go to four year degree colleges.

And so this is something that not only in providing this resource to increase enrollment, that student experience, but you know, what is CTE?

What does a program look like?

And so the there's something called NLPS or next level programs of study that are organized by clusters and by pathways.

So a few examples of a cluster might be advanced manufacturing.

And certainly in our area, the strength in manufacturing, that's automation, robotics, that's industry 4.0 types of trainings, precision machining, welding technologies, education and training, early childhood types of training, business management, ministry, illustration and supply chain logistics, architecture and construction.

And so these things are specific to the fields today that we're growing in and have both a cluster and specific course ways and pathways to follow under each one of those curricula.

Right.

And I want to because you because you mentioned the the jobs of the future part of your study was looking at sort of jobs in the future where that need was and what skills would be required for that.

Sure.

And so there's been a variety of studies done.

You can look at Bureau of Labor Statistics, but there's been some local studies conducted on what would be the top 20 occupations, both in the region, in St. Joe County and beyond.

And, you know, there are some things that you'd expect to see in the manufacturing discipline in health science, as well as construction trades are major growth areas as well as sales and professional occupations.

And so as you consider our pathways in automation, robotics, precision machining, they align to some of those occupations in health sciences and certainly in the business and administration really align to the jobs as well as those pathways.

So it makes really great sense to expand the amount of offerings we have and to expand the capacity for students across the county and Kareemah come your way.

So so as we talked before, CTE programs already exist in the high schools.

Each of the high schools has their own, especially so.

So talk a little bit about how the development of a hub impacts the the CTE programing that's going on already in high schools.

Yes.

So this is actually the hub would actually complement the high schools.

It's not going to take anything away from the high schools.

Now, they would come to the hub for some of their courses, their three hour courses, but it doesn't take anything away from the high schools or the magnets it actually complements and gives them more opportunity to get more credits in a hub and to explore and learn.

So we're really excited about it, right?

You know, it's interesting, I think as a in a tight labor market, what I'm understanding from many CTE centers is we can't find people to teach because the really talented people are out working somewhere.

So it sounds like even a hub helps address that kind of issue and efficiency.

Absolutely.

It addresses those issues and efficiencies and it also creates opportunities for us internal in the corporation to do some programing with our you know, we have buildings where we have engineers and different things that need to be done to do some programing in the school corporation, some additional programing out on the career side, and also helps us to align our pathways earlier on and ensure that those pathways have a feeder they feed into the high school, but then beyond that, into the workforce.

So it's very exciting.

Yeah.

So let me ask a maybe so I'm old, like I've already established that, but it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do when I grow up, right?

Like I didn't have that sort of clear moment that a lot of people did.

Just just talk about if you're that kid, right, if you will.

Is CTE right for me is other stuff right for me.

Give us some perspective on on that.

What do you what do you think?

Do kids need to know what they're going to do in the ninth grade now or Right or not?

I don't know.

Well, I think the the notion of a pathway in ninth grade doesn't mean you have to know what you're going to do your whole career.

But the earlier I believe that you get exposed to it, the more information that you have to make those real decisions.

And so I was a biologist working in economic development today.

But let's say that a hub adds the amount of courses and exposure for what is currently offered today.

So maybe there's the first three hour block they call concentrator A maybe now you can add a concentrator B and a work based learning opportunity within the high school career to be able to have that experience.

And with the Hub, maybe you can have multiple experiences beyond what is currently offered today.

And that exposure really is a benefit to our students.

Absolutely.

And it allows us to add that exploratory will for our students a little bit earlier, like a middle school add that will and with the exploratory will, the hub will allow us to have the capacity to absorb that.

If we add that exploratory will a little bit earlier for students and they get that exposure.

Kareemah let me come your way because I want to make sure we don't get away from that.

The half hour is getting away from us.

So in our last 3 minutes or so, just talk about where we are now in terms of the development of the hub and kind of what's happening next.

So the the larger group, they meet every week and kind of go over some of the things and Andrew discussed governance and all of those things, all those back end pieces.

Right now we just submitted a full plan to the South Bend Community School Board and it's a full facilities plan.

It's a 5 to 10 year plan.

In that plan, we're asking it to move forward with the career hub.

There was a commitment that was made back in the referendum.

We still have those funds.

So that information is out there.

That includes the center or the hub on April and April 17th, they will actually be voting on that full for South Bend facilities Comprehensive Plan.

And we would then move forward with executing what that looks like In terms of location.

We've done a lot around feasibility, so we've done some feasibility study work in terms of what that where that location could be and cost and other things on the back end.

So we're really excited right Andrew in our last 2 minutes here.

So talk about what excites you most.

You've had a chance to be in this from the beginning.

The conversation with employers, conversation with schools, talk about this.

So so those years of they took nothing else away from our conversation.

What should they be most excited about?

Well, this hasn't been done before in this county.

And so the courage and leadership to come together I think is really exciting and should be highlighted.

I think right now we have a real concrete plan that is being vetted and voted upon for moving forward then.

So the concept that we're talking about turns into a locations plan, a facilities plan, it turns into doing and so hopefully in the fall of 2025, there would be a facility for us to send our students to.

And our community should be excited because we have an improved and more excellent pathway for our students and Kareemah our last minute talk about give the mom dad perspective.

Right.

Mom and dad are trying to figure out should I send give them give me 30 seconds on why they should think about of current technical education in South Bend Career tech education in South Bend.

I think we've done a great job with some really robust programs, but we've really listened to the needs not only in our community but in our region.

And we are we look to not disappoint.

And and the plan that we're putting out to the community and the region.

And we want to be the regional hub.

Great.

Well, I'm excited about thank you both for the good work that you do.

And I know there's a lot of excitement in the business community about this option and what it does to prepare students well.

Look forward to having you back for some updates along the way.

That's it for our show today.

Thank you for watching on WNIT or listening to our podcast to watch this episode.

Again, in any of our past episodes, you can find economic outlook a WNIT.org or find our podcasts on most major podcast platforms.

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I'm Jeff Rea.

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