High school maps out pathways to the future
Students will pick specialization, like a college major
In fewer than 100 days, students across the region will collect their diplomas and close out their high school careers. Some will head to college or pursue vocational training, others will immediately join the workforce. It’s the time-honored crescendo on a dozen or so years of schooling, a gateway to adulthood.
By graduation, most students will have at least begun to consider the familiar question that towers over adolescence: What do you want to do with the rest of your life?
Woodland Hills High School students will soon take on that puzzle before they learn to drive.
Beginning next school year, students will pick one of six pathways to specialize in throughout high school, similar to choosing a major in college. Focuses will guide which classes students take and will appear as an endorsement on transcripts in a play to appeal to prospective colleges and employers.
“It came up in talking with students,” Woodland Hills superintendent James Harris said. “They want to feel more involved in their education, and they were already doing a lot of this on their own, so we decided to build these pathways.”
The district plans to align existing programs and classes with the chosen focuses.
Pathways will include arts and communications; business, finance and information technology; industry technology; human services; health services; and STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Each will include between three and five subsets, such as the nursing and medical assistance specialties within the health services track.
“We think this will help get students involved more, and it should help with discipline, because we’re giving our young adults a voice in what they want to do,” he said.
School systems throughout the country have made similar pushes toward specialization in an attempt to make students more marketable after graduation. Some local districts — including Baldwin-Whitehall, Chartiers Valley and Upper St. Clair — have already implemented career pathways.
“We’ve been trying to get more deliberate at sharing with kids what types of jobs are out there, as they’re scheduling, and what types of courses may link up cleanly,” Baldwin-Whitehall superintendent Randal Lutz said of the approach the district adopted last year.
In July 2016, the state Department of Education issued a series of recommendations on career readiness in Pennsylvania. The report looked at ways for the state to help students access highquality career and technical education programs and partner with business and community groups. Among the recommendations: Create incentives for embedding career pathways in K12 education.
Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, said her organization has traditionally opposed specialization because it believes students should be free to pursue a wide mix of disciplines to build a diverse skill set and find the right fit.
“It’s good for those kids who know exactly what they want to do from the time they’re 5 years old,” she said. “But it’s not so good for students who don’t. And how could they know?”
Although she did not specifically weigh in on the Woodland Hills approach, Ms. Pasquerella said that choosing what amounts to a major in high school adds to an already long list of pressures that teenagers face.
“Their lives are so heavily scripted that they don’t feel like they can take academic and intellectual risks,” she said. “And that’s such an important part of learning.”
That won’t be a problem in Woodland Hills, Mr. Harris said. Students will have freedom to swap focuses if they decide to change course, as electives within the focuses will include overlaps between them.
“They’re not locked in so much that they can’t go into another area if they feel this isn’t right for them,” he said.
Senior Anthony Spinelli said he would have benefited from the pathways, even if his career goals have shifted slightly in the past few years. As a sophomore, he had his sights set on pursuing a real estate career straight out of high school. But then doubts crept in as a junior.
“I started thinking that I don’t want to rely on one person for my future,” he said. “I want to be able to rely on myself and do it on my own.”
An aspiring entrepreneur who, at age 18, talks trading strategies and dreams of early retirement, Anthony had once planned to major in business at college. But then that changed, too.
“I realized that everybody’s majoring in business,” he said. “How are you going to separate yourself? If 100,000 people major in business, what good is that? It’s essentially not having a degree.”
This summer, Anthony plans to go to Arizona, where he will live with his older sister and work as a caddie for a family friend on the LPGA tour. He has been accepted into Maricopa Community Colleges, and wants to major in finance and double-minor in business and communications. His goal: build a personal finance app within his first two years of school.
Finding a purpose
One beneficiary of the Pathways program could be Jennifer Damico, who devotes her days to helping students find their purpose. She heads the Woodland Hills College and Career Center, which was launched in 2009 with funding from a federal grant to help underrepresented students get into college. The district has since taken on funding the office itself and expanded its mission to all students.
Its services include help on resumes and college applications; landing scholarships and financial aid; internships and job shadowing; and determining a student’s skills and interests.
It’s a busy place, with students shuffling in and out throughout the school day. The center’s calendar this year includes at least 18 field trips and 45 career and college information forums.
In Ms. Damico’s office, conversations often begin by taking stock of where a student is and where they want to go. “I ask them, ‘If you could only take one class here, what would it be? And then, ‘Where do you see yourself?’” she said. “Every kid’s different, so you kind of have to get a feel for them and how much they’ve actually thought about it.”
Sometimes, it’s a matter of pruning out the things students don’t like, or, for example, gently dissuading students averse to math and science from pursuing a career in medicine.
Shortly after 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, a senior student — one of the dozens in and out of the center throughout the day — planted herself in the wooden chair beside Ms. Damico’s desk and the pair went to work polishing an admissions essay. “How tough do you want me to be?” Ms. Damico asked the student, who told her not to hold back.
For the next 20 minutes, Ms. Damico scrutinized the essay’s structure and word choices — such as the merits of view versus perspective — and worked to maximize the allotted 500 words. She encouraged the student to explain in the essay that she had already been accepted into other colleges.
“It has to be about you,” Ms. Damico told the student, who hopes to become an engineer, perhaps working with wind turbines as her father does. “This is about you.”
The center recently hosted a workshop on job readiness. During the session, more than a dozen students reeled off questions about resumes, while several job recruiters provided advice and information about entry-level positions.
Rasaun Brown, the subject of an earlier profile in this series, was among the students in the workshop tightening up his two-page resume. Among the credentials listed on the document included his after-school job at the Braddock Youth Project, experience at the Forbes Road Career and Technology Center and his clothes design startup “Cash Flow Clothing.”
“I have a plan for the next 10 years, if everything works out the way it’s supposed to,” he said.
Rasaun plans to study auto mechanics at Rosedale Technical College for his first two years, then transfer to Point Park University to study business management and fashion design.
Savanna Dallas, 18, is less certain. She attends most of the College and Career Center functions, and in the last year has keyed in on pursuing a career in criminal justice. But she and her family disagree on whether she should go to school close to home or to her preferred choice, Delaware State University, which is more than five hours away by car.
“There’s still time, but I still don’t know where I’m going to go,” she said. “I only have a couple months to make up my mind.”