Career and technology school boosts options
The renovation of a halfcentury old high school is nearly complete as the Calgary Board of Education begins to remodel how it offers career and technology training to its students.
Instead of classrooms at the Lord Shaughnessy career and technology centre, there are industrial standard kitchens, welding and autobody shops, a salon and spa for students to train as hairdressers, and more.
The renovation of the Lord Shaughnessy is part of a bigger package of work being done across the province to reshape the type of schooling available to students.
It’s a move away from strict timetables and conventional classroom instruction to a more hands-on training. It offers career courses in a province facing an incoming labour shortage.
“This is a shift. This is not a school,” said Cathy Faber, the school board’s superintendent of learning innovation, on a tour Thursday. “There are no traditional core courses here.”
There are only 280 students at the moment, as construction, which suffered a sixmonth delay, is still being completed in places and some programs remain under development.
The students come from 11 high schools in the city, including adjacent Central Memorial in North Glenmore. Many attend Lord Shaughnessy parttime, while studying regular subjects like math and English at their home schools. Others are returning to school to pick up new courses.
By next fall, the CBE believes 1,200 will attend. Eventually, there will be 2,000 students, as the school expands to weekends and evenings.
But there are challenges to improving career training, including the price-tag. The renovation has a budget of $9.57 million, approved in February 2011.
Faber said another $800,000 to $1 million will be needed to finish some pieces, including the broadcast centre.
The CBE says Lord Shaughnessy is a template for significant upgrades the school board wants to make to workshops, studios and kitchens at high schools across the city.
There likely won’t be another stand-alone career and technology centre like Lord Shaughnessy. But high schools will specialize in certain subjects, on top of their regular programs, and offer it to students in adjacent schools.
Such improvements feature prominently in the board’s three-year capital plan, which the CBE wants the province to fund.
But it’s expensive: the cost to roll out the entire career and technology wish list is pegged at $100 million.
The Alberta government has been promising 50 new schools and 70 modernizations across the province, but so far has not publicly identified where all the projects will go.
“We know that our high schools are doing a great job in lots of areas,” Faber said. “But they can’t provide this kind of programming. This has to be a different setting, different approach, different level of skills, different equipment.”
There also a provincewide concern over recruiting staff who are qualified both as teachers, and as experts in their trade. The province hopes a bridge program that turns journeymen into certified teachers will help.
Faber said she believes Lord Shaughnessy will have a full complement of teachers for next fall, but it will be tight.
Teachers in special fields are needed. An electrical engineering class, for instance, builds hovercraft, robots and can crushers.
“You wouldn’t really do any of these things in physics or chemistry. You just do labs. In here you do hands on stuff every time,” said Grade 12 student Kevin Neil.
The school is a move away from the fixed learning hours that have dominated schooling for decades. The courses are meant to better move students from high school into careers.
There is not a set time to complete course credits. Students who do well advance quickly and avoid boredom, while those who struggle can take more time.
“One person you can show them a blunt cut or a finger wave and they catch it immediately,” said Sandra Moren, a hairdressing teacher.
“We can move them on to the next sequence. The ones that are behind, we work with them personally to bring them up.”