Climbing the Ladder
Career and Technical Education Center gives students a step up.
Frisco High School senior Julia Duke is dreaming of covering stories for a major news network. She hopes that her broadcast experience using industry standard cameras and editing equipment at Frisco’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) Center is putting her ahead of the competition.
Education
Certified Success
Students who complete Frisco CTE Center courses could be eligible for certification required for some jobs.
- ServSafe, food safety
- A*S*K (Assessment of Skills and Knowledge for business) certification
- Microsoft Office Specialist
- Certified Nurse Assistant
- Pharmacy Technician
- Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education
- Veterinary Assistant
- Texas Nursery Professional
- OSHA 10-Hour Safety
- PNIE, CCENT, CCNA and CompTIA’s A+, Server+ and N+ computer programming certificates.
Source: Frisco CTE
Keeping It Real
Frisco’s CTE Center, which opened in 2008, is a community-backed project that helps students experience careers they may, or in some cases, may not want to pursue after high school.
“You get real-world experience,” Duke says. “You go out with the cameras and get the stories.”
She and 13 other students, twice as many students as last year, produce a weekly news program, learn beat reporting and work in a studio that’s better equipped than some small market TV stations. After completing the media technology courses, Duke could apply for certification in the Apple Final Cut Studio Pro editing program. The CTE Center provides the students with free software training that would cost $750 or more from commercial training companies.
Duke was one of 1,000 students in the Frisco Independent School District who enrolled in advanced career and technical training courses last year. The 125,000-square-foot CTE Center is located centrally among Frisco ISD’s five existing high schools and currently serves 1,600 juniors and seniors from those campuses. In addition to the broadcast studio, it houses a full-service restaurant, a bank, a courtroom and a convenience store.
“If we can find that creativity and that spark and allow them to entertain their passions and their dreams, the students are going to do well,” says Wes Cunningham, the CTE Center’s principal.
Earning Potential
The center is open to all 11th and 12th graders who have fulfilled prerequisites at their high school campus. The advanced courses offered at the CTE Center are aligned in career clusters previously determined by the state’s Achieve Texas program.
“The courses we offer here are specific to our community,” Cunningham says. For instance, Frisco has a thriving health care industry, so the center offers a medical science career pathway that trains students to a level where they can obtain Certified Nurse Assistant or Pharmacy Technician Certification. The number of pharmacy technicians is expected to increase by 32 percent by 2016 nationwide, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They also can earn college credit toward an associate degree in Applied Sciences or a bachelor’s degree by taking Tech Prep courses offered at the center.
According to 2006-07 data from the U.S. Department of Education (the most recent information available), the total number of CTE students in Texas was approximately 1.5 million, including about 1.1 million currently attending high school. TR
Pooling Resources
In 2003, Frisco voters approved a bond package that included $15 million to build the first phase of a Career and Technical Education (CTE) Center. The district’s rapid student population growth – 12 percent to 20 percent annually for the past decade – prompted officials to build the CTE’s first and second phases simultaneously. Voters approved an additional $19 million in 2006 as part of a $798 million bond package to expand the district’s classroom capacity to 50,000 students.
“We encouraged community buy-in and communication from nearly every source imaginable. Our board was very proactive in getting community buy-in before the elections took place and we continued allowing and encouraging community access and feedback during construction,” says Wes Cunningham, Frisco CTE principal. “Once they saw what we were going to be able to provide our students in the way of an academically rigorous, personally relevant education, they couldn’t help but be positive about it.”