Wooster High students gain hands-on experience for workforce careers
A column-mounted workstation crane is one of the things career-technical education students at Wooster High School will be able to work with in the vocational program. CTE programs like Wooster’s are expanding rapidly, giving students hands-on training and a direct path into high-demand, well-paying skilled trades.Submitted
As demand for people to work in industrial jobs continues to soar, the demand for education pointing young people toward careers in various related industries and jobs has rapidly begun to follow. In places where advanced placement classes once dominated the landscape, career-technical education is elbowing its way onto the scene.
“They’re not the future; they’re the now,” Shawn Wade said of students at Wooster High School who are part of the school’s CTE vocational program.
Wade is head of the program, which is in its early stages and ready to burst at the seams. There are currently a dozen students per class, 12 juniors and 12 seniors, but Wade said those numbers have to increase because demand is already increasing.
“A lot of them aren’t aware of it yet,” Wade said of the student body at-large. “Now that it’s up and going, more of them are going to want to do it.”
Once required for all students to at least dabble in, the likes of metal shop and wood shop faded from view over the last few decades. They’re now roaring back as high-tech entities, getting teens started toward careers where they can begin earning money upon graduation, if not sooner.
Gone are the days when a college degree was the end-all. There are other paths to prosperity, and the new routes are not littered with student loans and the ensuing debt they bring. They put young people into careers before their 20th birthdays and get them headed down career paths as much as five years sooner than traditional students.
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Forklift training is available to students in Wooster High's CTE vocational education program.Submitted
According to an article produced by the Ohio Department of Education about a month ago, the number of students participating in CTE programs has increased by 10% the last four years, adding 13,000 students since 2021. It appears those numbers will only accelerate.
Demand, the ODE said, was outpacing availability, so some students are put on waitlists. That has led to the state investing $300 million in CTE, using various grants, which have allowed 116 schools to expand or build CTE facilities and/or buy state-of-the-art equipment.
In fact, just about anywhere you look studies and reports predict major growth in schools everywhere. Some are saying CTE already accounts for 15% of high school credits, and the number of districts offering those courses is closing in on 100%.
Adam Price of Handling Concepts Inc. saw an opportunity to get involved with the program at Wooster High. That included installing a crane students could learn on.
“He wanted to get a crane in there that they can use,” Price said. “We sell these work-station cranes, so we just mounted this thing to the concrete floor. They put that in, and the kids can get a feel for, “Hey, this is what a crane is like in the real world.’ So I went in and spec’d it out and came up with a plan. We ordered a crane and installed it, tested it and made sure it was safe.”
The crane is not one of the ones you’ll see on a skyscraper or anywhere outside. It’s a 20-by-20-foot, free-standing, column-mounted crane. Indoors, they are used for purposes similar to the huge outdoor cranes, just doing much smaller jobs.
“These are workstation cranes,” Price said. “They put them up in plants for an operator to work on. People who think of cranes think of 100 tons, 50 tons, spanning the whole building. This isn’t that. This one is 1,000 pounds."
It’s just another vocational tool that if a student can learn on it at the high school level, he or she can be ready to work on it soon thereafter in the real world.
According to the United States Department of Education, more than 2.1 million skilled trade jobs could be unfilled by 2030. With the labor workforce aging rapidly and heading toward retirement, replacements are scarce.
Many vocational fields offer starting pay at $20-$30 per hour. That translates to $40,000-$60,000 annually — good for a 19-year-old, and it grows from there. And the work is not going away.
Industrial products fill shelves at Wooster High School as part of the new CTE vocational education program.Submitted
Price said he got this idea because he was on-site at another facility at another school and saw a job crane that could be used for tasks similar to those he could use too.
“We brought it into Wooster,” he said. “It seems to be more common because of the high demand for these jobs. From our standpoint, a lot of what we do is go to plants, distributors, and they’re always hiring. They’re always in demand.”
Cranes, forklifts and welding tools are a short list of what is available to CTE students at Wooster and other schools. The idea is to expose students to things they might be able to do immediately upon graduation to kick-start careers in high-demand vocations.
Much like a typical education prepares students for college, a CTE track prepares them for the workforce, which allows young men and women to skip college if they want, along with skipping all its associated costs.
“They’re trying to get their credentials,” Wade said. “We’re building their résumés, getting their certificates. It’s a new program. I really feel like right now it’s just starting. I see it being pretty big. We do a lot of stuff — hand tools, a little machining. Welding is our main focus. We do other things as well. We’ve got a forklift license (program). My goal is to get them ready.
"You used to have your wood shop and metal shop, and it kind of went away. Now it’s definitely coming back to the schools. They can make a lot if they don’t want to go to college."
