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MPS - Oklahoma Career Tech Spotlight

MPS Career Tech Spotlight - Perkins
Rusty Anderson

Spotlight by OKCareerTech

Moore Public Schools has worked to ensure students receive information, skills, and experiences to be successful in the career of their choice.  Well before ICAP, Moore utilized Perkins funds to provide a Career Specialist who assisted students in understanding what career opportunities exist. This single idea has grown into a comprehensive career development program. 

Today, our Perkins Basic Grant allows us to have a Career Specialist at our three high schools. This position has evolved over the past five years. Our Career Specialists meet with every freshman class, introduce them to OKCareerGuide, and walk them through the assessments, education plans, goals, and work-based learning.

The activities mentioned are only the beginning of the work the Career Specialists complete.  They recruit for the high school Career Tech courses, support Career Tech teachers, manage the internship program, take seniors on industry tours, provide students with opportunities to receive certifications, and meet with students individually to discuss their future goals. The internship program has provided many students with a great career opportunity to try it before they buy it.

Some of their most successful stories are the students who decide a career internship is not what they want to do for the rest of their careers.

Our Career specialists have found internship opportunities for students in many fields, including the police department, medical field/hospitals, auto repair, physical therapy, dentistry, banks, realty, veterinarian, culinary, teaching, sonography, and many more. 

Beyond the Perkins Basic Grant, we have applied for several innovative grants. We were fortunate enough to receive the Innovative Strategies to Recruit and Retain CTE Instructors Grant.

The first year, we rented a facility at Summer Summit to meet with all our CT instructors. We had several new teachers, and when you have three high schools, many do not know one another. We utilized the time in the facility we rented to have some icebreakers, spend time with one another, play some games, and discuss plans for the year. This gave our teachers a face with a name and someone to contact for peer input and grew us as a cohesive team. 

The next event we provided to assist with teacher recruitment and retention was to send our Computer Repair teachers to the Dell World Conference. We have a partnership with Dell and our students can receive their Dell Computer Repair Certification as they complete our courses. Our teachers gained more understanding of everything involved with Dell computers, collaborated, and built a strong relationship by traveling and participating in the conference.

We did not expend second-year funds on the Dell World Conference because Dell asked us to send three students and a teacher to attend, be on stage with Michael Dell, and display the skills they learned in the Computer Repair program. The opportunity made a great impact on the entire district and was an incredible experience for our students, teacher, repair technician, and district technology director. 

In addition to the great experience at Dell World, we used our recruitment and retention grant to touch all our high school CT instructors. We provided needed technology in the classroom for those instructors. The upgraded technology allowed them to expand what they were doing with students and provide more efficiency.

Also, we took our teachers on field trips. We utilized funding from the grant to allow teachers to experience Tinker Air Force Base, the Federal Aviation Administration, Children's Hospital, and the Women in Flight Museum. These field trips empowered the teachers to understand the career opportunities available and make business connections. Several teachers provided great feedback that the experience allowed them to find guest speakers for their classroom and gave them additional understanding of how their pathway would lead to career opportunities.

Our district has committed to developing Career Tech opportunities and pathway development. We now have new College and Career Centers that house the Computer Repair pathway, Computer Science pathway, and Aviation pathways. The vision of the College and Career Centers is that they will change over time as the labor market demands. 

The Career Tech programs, funding, and innovative grants have provided critical resources for all the activities mentioned. We would have missed out on so many things without the resources provided by Career Tech! The activities and events we have provided through the funding have built a strong Career Tech team at Moore Public Schools. Our Career Tech instructors have bought in and feel more engaged and interested in Career Tech opportunities for students.

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