More Vocational Education

"Thirty seven to forty seven percent of students that start college will not finish." That's what Principal Joe Amann of C.E. McCormick Area Technology Center told me when I interviewed him about about the students at his high school. He then posed a question to me, "Where are they going to work?"


Voc-tech...as we used to call it, and now it's Area Technology Centers, were looked upon as last ditch efforts to educate those who were "unable to be educated." Students who would rather work with their hands and would never be successful in a classroom, where books, and theories made up much of your day. "Those students." For years that was the stereotype, and we couldn't have been more wrong.

My twin brother was one of "those students." We were as different as night and day. The traditional school setting was not hard for me, and I looked forward to college and enjoyed it. He hated school, so I thought. He struggled in class, I was lead to believe, but he loved to work with his hands. And my mother often told him when he would be challenged in school and his ability questioned by teachers, that he was in many ways smarter than most of the students in his class... and Regina! I hated that then, as a mother I understand it now, just trying to balance out the unfair amount of comparing people often made between us.

But she was right. Students at Area Technology Centers are just as smart, creative, ambitious as students who can excel in a classroom setting. Area Tech students appear to quickly excel while concentrating on their technical skills because they see first hand, how algebra, science and geometry are relevant in the real world. And then they soar.

And we need to them to soar. Where would we live, how would we transport our families, how could we communicate with each other through the information superhighway? How could we stay warm in the winter, feel cool and content in the summer? Who would give us our medicine, rub our hand and tell us it's going to be o-k while taking critical information as we check into a hospital or sit in a waiting room.

They make the world go around.

There is room for every type of worker, and every type of student. And like a pair of twins with two different approaches to life, with the same support system there is more than one way to learn and more than one way to contribute in this world. But only if they are equally supported can they equally Make the Grade.