MONTGOMERY, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) – A local school corporation is helping identify the student’s interests and career goals early on, with the help of a grant.
Barr-Reeve Community Schools recently received a $400,000 Ready Schools Grant through the Regional Opportunity Initiative (ROI).
“It’s really about taking schools and looking at them as a major player in the economic growth of the region and so how do we have schools that are ready and aligned to the economic and workforce needs,” Andrea Huff, Superintendent of Barr-Reeve Community School, said.
It’s a grant disbursed over several years, and Barr-Reeve is currently the fourth cohort to go through this process.
“How do we have students in a place [where] they’re ready for those job opportunities when they come available?” Huff asked. “How do we have them in a place where they know what those job opportunities are? How do we have them in a place where they know this is what I want to do for the rest of my life? Or this is where my skills are going to take me and this is something I can add value to the workforce.”
The first 10 months of the process focus on the design phase.
“It has multiple phases. Again, getting input, looking at what trends are we seeing come back from our stakeholders, going on promising practice visits so that we are learning what our other schools are doing, what’s working well,” Huff said.
The next steps in the design process are ideation, refinement and then implementation.
“One of the promising practice visits that I went on, every kid was able to tell me what their future plans were you know instead of the ‘I don’t know’ but exposing them to other career possibilities and showing them the wide range of opportunities that we have in our community,” Krista Swartzentruber, Kindergarten Teacher and part of the design team at BRCS, said.
Leaders with Barr-Reeve said they already have programs in place at their schools to help students get thinking about careers early on, but this financial backing will allow them to take it a step further.
“This will just provide us something on site and then hopefully these programs will be able to benefit the school for example culinary,” Dena Lengacher, Corporation Services Director, said. “Maybe able to help with feeding staff members or maybe some different groups throughout the school year.”
Barr-Reeve will have multiple “promising practice visits” throughout February.
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