Education leads to career exploration

by Mary Le Arneal
Published 11/16/16

This week American Education Week is spotlighting the importance of providing every child in America with a quality public school education. With a school vision statement of “Building Success Together,” North Bend Central has career education as one of its goals to help students succeed and provide all with an education that will benefit them in the future.

In the first year of the career education program at NBC, coordinator Katie Wright has taken the task full throttle. Before she even came to NBC, she visited other career education programs. Once in North Bend, Wright began networking. Meeting people, visiting businesses, talking to anyone she could use as a resource for the program. And the program expanded before it even started. Initially, it was thought junior and seniors would be the main target. Now they are seeing the need to start with the younger students to get them thinking of career paths they might like to take and how to focus their education courses on a career goal.

When high school principal Brenda Petersen was proposing the career ed model, she had a few students in mind who she thought would be helped by this program.

“These were students with no direction,” Petersen said. “In school they just don’t know. There were five or six kids. We got three of them right off the bat. We have others we are getting next semester. They see the benefits.”
Wright is happy with the three students to start the high school program.

“I think we have a good start,” Wright said. “It’s been a learning curve for me trying to network. Just being a member of the community and saying we have students interested in this, who can I call?”

Wright continues to network, meeting new people every day and finding out what students’ parents, grandparents and other relatives do that might be of interest to students. She asks people in the community who could provide experiences for students to contact her at the high school.

Part 2 of this story looks at what is being done at the high school level with career education.

Read the full story in the print or e-edition.

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