6 local districts partner in Consortium for Public Education program for student career readiness

A local collaborative that helps students prepare for future success has launched an initiative with six area school districts to create a pathway to that goal.

The nonprofit Consortium for Public Education is partnering with the Burrell and Deer Lakes school districts in the Allegheny Valley, the Greensburg Salem and Jeannette City school districts in Westmoreland County, and the Woodland Hills and Cornell school districts in Allegheny County for a program dubbed “Positioning Students for Future Success.”

The program will focus on three key areas identified during sessions with representatives from the participating districts — improving school design, strengthening family engagement and increasing students’ career readiness.

“During the covid-19 pandemic, schools had to make a lot of changes,” said Mary Kay Babyak, executive director of CPE. “Some of the changes worked well while others didn’t. But all the schools agreed that they needed to do a better job of engaging with students.”

Babyak said CPE can help districts that have ideas about better ways to engage with students or to achieve the other goals they set.

“We can provide them with the resources to help them address the needs they identify,” she said.

Deer Lakes School District officials welcome the chance to partner with the organization, said spokesman Shawn Annarelli.

“We look forward to meeting with the Consortium for Public Education to learn more details about the initiative with the goals of improving school design, strengthening family engagement and increasing students’ future readiness,” Annarelli said.

Annarelli said the district has previously received help by partnering with the organization.

Last year, CPE helped the district develop an Educator in the Workforce program, which provided 13 staff members with four weeks of training to develop and implement more project-based learning in the classroom, he said.

The district also received assistance from the organization last year for its Future Readiness Lab, a program that helps students explore their career goals so they can develop a strategy to reach them, according to Annarelli.

With funding from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, CPE’s help can range from bringing in outside expertise to assist with a problem to conducting the research needed to properly address an issue.

Babyak said one of the benefits of bringing representatives from multiple districts together is that it gives them an opportunity to see how others might address an issue or solve a problem.

“They can discuss what’s going on in their districts, bounce ideas off each other and collaborate on solutions,” she said.

Burrell Superintendent Shannon L. Wagner said the district is “excited to be part of such a great network of schools” and is looking forward to learning more about individualized student learning plans used by other districts.

”We hope to share our work in Social Emotional Learning with other districts,” she said, citing the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Enrichment Programused by Burrell. It focuses on four pillars — courage, gratitude, forgiveness and compassion. “When we talk about future ready skills for our students, emotional intelligence is woven into the needed skills for employment.”

Wagner said CPE also will help the district provide professional development for teachers “to connect their content/grade level with career readiness awareness and strategies for their content/grade level.”

Jeannette City School District Superintendent Matt Jones was pleased about the opportunities the initiative could afford students at the district.

“It allows us to partner with other school districts and the sharing of ideas to build capacity for our students in the workforce after graduation,” he said. “Oftentimes, we are operating in a bubble.”

That means staff members can pick the brains of their counterparts around the area in an effort to open up opportunities they might otherwise have not known about for students.

It could help students navigate entering the workforce straight out of high school in their own community or others around the area.

CPE selected the districts to create a diverse pool of participants, Babyak said. Cornell and Jeannette City are small districts, Deer Lakes and Burrell are rural, and Woodland Hills and Greensburg Salem represent urban districts.

Greensburg Salem Acting Superintendent Kenneth A. Bissell said the district has a nearly two-decade long relationship with CPE and looks forward to engaging with the other districts “in learning and collaborating for change.”

“We are always looking to them for support in what we would like to do with teaching, learning, staff support and business partnerships,” he said.

“I see Greensburg Salem helping lead discussions in standards-based learning, which will eventually lead to improvements and change in the design of schools for personalized learning and focus our efforts on our mission of future readiness for all our children.”

Bissell said he hopes the collaboration between CPE and the six districts will help “change a system that has failed to change.”

“We have introduced new technologies, buildings and tools,” he said. “But the system continues to value time over learning and comparing children with children instead of valuing learning over time and each child to the standard of learning.”