CAREER CURRICULUM;
BYLINE: LEANN HOLT Journal Staff Writer
Remember all the random classes you had to take in high school? The ones that made you scratch your head and wonder if you would ever use what you had learned in "real life"?
What about finding yourself in college with no idea what you wanted to study? Maybe you changed majors - or even careers - several times before you figured out what you wanted to be when you grew up.
Career clusters - coordinated high school classes in a specific field of study - may relieve some students of this traditional angst.
Combined with internships, job shadowing and hands-on experience, high schoolers who are part of career clusters can now emerge from high school with a clear sense of the path they want their lives to take. Often, they've got some college credits and job experience under their belts as well.
"You don't always know what you want to do," said Sarah Manriquez, a sophomore in the Health and Human Services Academy at Albuquerque High School, the school's name for the career cluster.
"That's what's great about this. You get to experience (a career) and see if you like it."
The move toward career clusters, also called career pathways or career technical education, is happening in high schools throughout the nation, propelled by $1.4 billion annually in federal dollars. The idea is to build a student's high school education around one of 16 fields of study while preparing that student for college or a career in the field.
Earlier this year, Gov. Bill Richardson announced that New Mexico would promote seven of the 16 career clusters in high schools, using $10 million in federal money.
The clusters, which include arts and entertainment, engineering, energy and environmental technologies and health and biosciences, will help produce a work force ready to meet the demands of those high-growth industries in the state, Richardson said.
Business leaders in Albuquerque seem to have welcomed the cluster concept with open arms. Several, like Jeff Van Dyke of VanDyke Software, have helped develop cluster curricu- lum and provided "real-world perspective" to students interested in a high-tech career.
Even if students aren't job ready right out of high school, they have learned the basics of how to function in a work environment, Van Dyke said.
"It is clear to me how much the program has impacted kids," Van Dyke said. "That kind of impact pays big dividends."
About 20 percent of high schools across the state have implemented career clusters, involving some 65,000 students, according to Catherine Cross Maple, deputy Cabinet secretary for the Public Education Department.
"There are a number of small rural high schools that have a hard time coming up with enough resources to implement the program," Cross Maple said. "We have some challenges, but we are working on a statewide approach."
Eight out of 11 Albuquerque high schools have some type of career pathways program, said Michael Stanton, who coordinates some of the local programs.
"We found the traditional way of teaching students - separate classes, separate teachers - was reaching a smaller and smaller percent of students," he said. "With contextual-based learning, when a student asks why they are taking a class, we can take them out into the real world and show them why."
Melanie Vigil recently had a "real world" experience when she did a job shadow with a pharmacy technician. Vigil, 18, is in her second year in the Health and Human Services Academy at Albuquerque High School.
"I'm so excited now," she said after spending a day in a pharmacy. "It will be six years in college, but now I have more of a motivation to go to college and prepare."
Albuquerque High School has the oldest career pathway program in the state, called the Academy of Advanced Technology.
Now in its sixth year, students who graduated from the academy in 2004 had a dropout rate that was almost half of the general school population, Stanton said. And the average grade-point average in the academy, which was 1.9 when the first class enrolled, had risen to 2.8 by graduation.
"Fewer kids are falling through the cracks," said John Schatzman, lead teacher for the technical academy. "It's great to watch kids go from gang-banging to mastering a skill. It's nice to be doing something that works."
Job fields
Career clusters in Albuquerque high schools:
Advanced Technology Health Services International Business Arts and the Humanities Automotive Technology Optics and Photonics Artisan Manufacturing Medical Assistant Marketing Business and Leadership For more information call Leah Gutierrez Wier, 880-8249, ext. 189
Schools that offer technical training and/or career paths: Career Enrichment Center, 247-3658:
Automotive Technology Cosmetology Practical Nursing Computer Technology
YouthBuild Trade & Technology Charter High School, 765-5517:
General Construction Auto Mechanics
The Albuquerque Institute for Mathematics and Science at University of New Mexico, 314-7272:
Mathematics Science Concurrent UNM enrollment