Public Education Matters

Various student voices 0:08
Public education matters. Public education matters. Public education matters.

Scott DiMauro 0:15
This is Public Education Matters, brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.

Katie Olmsted 0:26
Welcome back to Public Education Matters, and welcome to the first episode of 2025. I'm Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the Ohio Education Association and the nearly 120,000 public school educators OEA represents across the state. When you think of public school educators, a lot of people would assume that means educating students in Gen Ed topics in traditional K-12 settings, and a lot of OEA members - teachers and education support professionals alike - do work in those schools, teaching those subjects. But there are a growing number of educators in Ohio who work in Career Technical Education or CTE - skilled professionals who are helping students gain real world skills and experiences to set them up for great careers, college, the military and more. The state of Ohio has been investing hundreds of millions of dollars to expand access to CTE programs for students as demand for this option continues to grow, but even as more students choose career tech education, a lot of people have a lot to learn about what CTE is and what it offers. Career Tech educators also have had an opportunity to learn from each other, which they did at the first ever OEA career tech leaders retreat in the fall. We sat down with one of the attendees after the retreat, take a listen.

Doug Picard 1:53
My name is Doug Picard, and I teach engineering and manufacturing at the Greene County Career Center in Xenia, Ohio.

Katie Olmsted 2:00
Doug, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. What have you seen when it comes to career tech in Ohio?

Doug Picard 2:08
I have seen growth. I have not been in the career tech scene all that long. This is year six for me, but since I have started, I have seen growth by almost 50% at least in my district. I've seen student growth, and I have also seen the hiring of career tech and academic and support professionals grow in this time. And also we opened up a brand new facility to house everybody and all of our new equipment.

Katie Olmsted 2:38
What do you think about that growth? What does it say about Ohio?

Doug Picard 2:42
It says that Ohio is taking a serious investment and leading the country, I'd say, in career, tech innovation and student placement, student work-based learning placement, and also the increased academic seriousness of everything that we do, whether it leads to going to college, entering the workforce, or enlisting in the military.

Katie Olmsted 3:05
So, I assume that was part of the conversation at the OEA Career Tech Leaders Retreat that was held in late September. You were there. Tell me a little bit about what that was like.

Doug Picard 3:17
So the retreat was, I think, something it has been needed for for a long time. I've been to a lot of retreats and leadership conferences, and career tech occasionally comes up by the the minority of folks who are in attendance. And there are always exceptions for career tech, exceptions for career tech: Career Tech doesn't always work like this. It doesn't always work like that. Having a career tech leaders retreat was was very nice, because I got to talk to a lot of people who were involved in career tech associations and vocational school districts and to see how they did things, how they overcame the challenges that are put in front of them, because we react to challenges in different ways than the traditional K-12 academic world, and we have lots of unique challenges that they don't have. They also have lots of challenges that that we don't have. And then we also have a lot of common ground that I don't know either side are aware of so it helped to kind of bridge that gap and to bring both sides a lot closer.

Katie Olmsted 4:27
What are some of those challenges?

Doug Picard 4:31
Well, when, when I was first hired, one of the things that I noticed was - I was hired to be a satellite teacher, and as a satellite teacher I'm part of the joint vocational school district, but I am, my body is on loan to Xenia High School to teach engineering over there. And that was a really big challenge, because I was dislocated from everybody else that that is part of my workforce. I am kind of on an island somewhere else, and being over in a traditional K-12 that doesn't really have a career tech, strong career tech presence, being over there was just kind of like you're all alone, and there's not a real voice for you over there. And that was something that we talked about a lot at the career tech leaders retreat, was about how do we take care of those satellite personnel? Because they are everywhere, and they are in our workforce. They're about 25% of our CTE teachers, as they are just located at schools throughout the county.

Katie Olmsted 5:46
Are you still a satellite teacher?

Doug Picard 5:49
I am not. So I that was my first year of teaching, was as a satellite teacher, and that was also during the pandemic. So I had just started working on my licensure, working on my certification classes. And then in March, as we all know, all the schools went, they went remote. And so that was, that affected me as well. And so in March, I went home and I delivered remote instruction. And then over that summer, I got a call from my from my supervisor, asking if I wanted to teach at the brand new main campus. They are standing up four new programs in our Take Flight initiative, which is designed to provide students and workforce education in the growing aerospace industry in our area, Xenia and the Miami Valley. And so I took that position and started our brand new engineering and manufacturing program. And so this is year five of that program, and we've graduated three classes since then.

Katie Olmsted 6:56
Okay, first off, that program sounds very cool. That is awesome. Second off, though, do you think that's sort of the the push, or the the direction of career tech education in Ohio, as we continue to invest in these centers, as the state continues to open up opportunities for more career tech education, that it's it's fewer, I guess, pushes into the traditional K-12 setting and more dedication to career tech education itself?

Doug Picard 7:28
Yes, and I think it's, I think it's important for students to have options. And when I was in high school, I was in upstate New York, so a familiar setting to to to where I teach now, in Xenia. So there's a lot more kids at Xenia, but it's still kind of a rural, semi rural area. I didn't have these options, and so I joined the military right out of high school. If I had these options, who knows where my life would have taken me. And I feel like I didn't have all those options, but being here where I'm at in Ohio, my son, he just graduated from a career tech program at Mad River School District in in Riverside, and he graduates class of 2023, and that career tech experience for him guided him into going to college. He did not join the military, and he had an internship while he was in high school, and through that, he realized that he had a goal and a focus now, which was to be an electrical engineer. And I wish I had that when I was a kid, but now I'm able to give that to other students. And yes, that is a huge push in our area, because the Wright Patt fuels a lot of the jobs and the research and everything like that around the Miami Valley. And so I've been fortunate enough to help place my kids in positions like that so they get into things like aerospace machining and manufacturing, all the way to research at the University of Dayton Research Institute and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Katie Olmsted 9:08
Do you think that's one of the common misconceptions about career techeducation? It's, you know, for for the kids who can't do the traditional path to college or whatever. That's that's not the case.

Doug Picard 9:21
That is correct, and I have very strong feelings about that, because I don't want career tech to be viewed as... two words I hate when they're put together is a "dumping ground." I that is the absolute wrong mentality to have about career tech. Career Tech, you're not going to thrive in career tech if you don't have the the basic skills that you that you would need to be successful in the K-12 area, we have the same graduation requirements. We have alternate pathways to graduation through industry credentials, and these industry credentials are a lot of them are designed for the the adult workforce. They are not easy to get. They do not lend any accommodations to achieve them. They are, they're, they're very hard. And also in in my pathway, in particular, I teach three College Credit Plus classes through Sinclair Community College. There's a lot of rigor in my class and students coming out of my class alone, they have 33 credit hours available to them if they take everything and pass everything that's available to them, and that is before they even touch the district's College Credit Plus English and speech and communication and other classes like that.

Katie Olmsted 10:16
That is truly amazing. And it's setting these students up for success, whatever their path is going to be. It is such an important step to helping them succeed.

Doug Picard 10:53
Right. And what I say to my students, who are, I have some students who are never college; I have some students who are never military; I have some students who are die hard I want to go to college. And my approach to this for the kids that say they never want to go to college, that was me once. And it was nice to have those college credits there when I made that choice to go to college. It was not an insurmountable challenge for me, because I already had a head start. So I give my students a head start. For my kids that may truly never want to go to college, they get a certificate from Sinclair, through my program that is a short term Technical Certificate in additive design. And so they can, they can be proud to have that.

Katie Olmsted 11:42
And it sets them up for employment in a way that they never would have had otherwise.

Doug Picard 11:47
That is true. And also the military. The military, they give meritorious promotions in basic training to students that have certain thresholds of college credit hours. So by coming through my program, if they decide to enlist in the military, they can come in as an E3 right out the gate, whereas, whereas a lot of the other people coming in with them with nothing would have to wait up to a year, year and a half for that promotion. So we're putting money in their pockets, whether they realize it now, or whether they realize it later.

Katie Olmsted 12:24
And on the big picture level, that's all the the money the state is investing in career, tech, education, that money coming back into our economy is a return on that investment.

Doug Picard 12:35
It absolutely is. I have, I have helped lots of local startups with placing students into there to to help be a force multiplier for the things that they want to do, because they're going into these places with skills. They aren't having to be trained from the ground up. They're going into these places and already beginning to add value. And then another program that we use is, it's called SOCHE. I believe this answers Strategic Ohio Council for Higher Education, but it's led by Dr Cassie Barlow, who was the Wright Patt base commander when I was in the Air Force before I retired. And they have a program to where they incentivize employers to hire our students and they actually pay their wages, a percentage of their wages, if they work certain thresholds of hours. So these companies, they have to invest in our students, because it's not just our students. What can they do for the companies? But this is also work-based learning. This is how every question I ask, every time I talk to an employer, I ask them, what are you going to teach my students? There are some that just want my students to go in there and turn wrenches, and that is that is great, and I am happy that they want to do that, but I also want them to teach my students things while they are out of the classroom.

Katie Olmsted 13:58
What do you wish - you mentioned earlier that sometimes when you're in a setting with non-career tech educators, the other side kind of just doesn't get what career tech educators go through, what the challenges are, what the opportunities are. What do you wish the traditional K-12 teachers understood?

Doug Picard 14:20
This is very easy: It is that career tech instructors, career tech teachers, we are hired, when we are hired brand new, we are hired right off the street. We are hired directly from industry. We don't know the acronyms that everybody else knows. We need a lot of help. We need a lot of support, and we need a lot of patience. We need to have, you know, kind of our hands held through a lot of the processes for that first year, because we don't know the systems that that the teachers that have been around for a lot longer, that they have known and grown up with. And teaching for career tech positions is not something that we graduated college to do. We were in another industry for many years and coming into K-12, it is, it is very scary. Fortunately for me, I was an instructor when I was in the Air Force. I was somewhat used to classroom management and other practices like that. And also on a larger taking a step back of the 20,000 foot view is like, what do your pay scales look like? What do they reflect? Are your pay scales in your districts, are they designed and built around the teachers that have been teaching since they're fresh out of college in their early 20s? Or do they have some kind of accommodation, wiggle room for career tech people that are coming in and they have, you know, they're 20 years behind these folks. So what do your pay scales look like? What does it look like for moving, moving in columns on the salary scale? Is it just bachelor's degree, master's degree, master's degree plus, or is there accommodations made for the very difficult credentials that we have to earn and maintain? Because for our industries, those are just as important as higher education, and a lot of times they include higher education in the in the curriculum to earn those credentials.

Katie Olmsted 16:27
And with so many second career educators, the Social Security issue has to be a very big one in career tech education. For career tech educators, I'm talking to you in mid-October. And for anybody just catching up, a couple weeks ago, there was a discharge petition for Congress to vote on the Government Pension Offset and Windfall Elimination Provision, restoring Social Security to people who would not get their full benefits because of a pension, which you would get as an educator. Doug, what do you hear from other career tech educators about how important this particular issue is?

Doug Picard 17:14
It is, for one, it's very surprising to hear how many aren't aware of it. They hear it through word of mouth, and they, a lot of them, they feel like, wow, you know, maybe they would have made different decisions in, you know, in the careers that they pursued, if they knew that this was going to be an issue. Because when you're when you're onto a second career, if you are a retired like, I'm retired Air Force, I already knew about it coming in. I was, I was warned, so to speak. I was, I was told about it already. And it, it's not fair, because a lot of us, we have put in that time to earn those full benefits. And you know that, I think that's definitely something that needs to be fixed. And I noticed the same, the same discharge petition that you're talking about, and I've seen it, it comes up over and over again, and I really hope that it changes, because I think it'll help bring more attention, it'll bring more eyes and fresh experience into the career tech world. Because those Social Security earnings, we've, we've earned those. I spent 21 years earning those benefits. And it is, it is absolutely not right with all of the other things that need fixing in in our state's education system, I think this one should be pretty high at the list, and it's definitely something that I've heard a lot of feedback about.

Katie Olmsted 18:41
And the value of career tech educators, as you say, coming straight off the street, is that they understand the industry, that nobody is going to be a better person to teach students about what needs to be done than the people who have been doing it. But GPO/WEP has to keep great educators out of our system. It's got to be a huge barrier.

Doug Picard 19:01
Yeah, it absolutely is. And, you know, there's, there are, so there are so many, so few positions I noticed in career tech, and it seems like for some of them, it is very hard to recruit these folks. It's especially hard to recruit, you know, a very diverse field of educators as well, because you're peeling people away from from very good companies. And we, we need those people too, because these students, they deserve to have the best of the best teaching them their, their skills, crafts and trades.

Katie Olmsted 19:38
Well Doug, thank you so much for giving us a little window into career tech education. Truly a great option for so many students.

Doug Picard 19:47
Thank you, Katie, and I think so too, and I hope that more students consider us and we are a very good option, and we are ready to lead this workforce.

Katie Olmsted 20:01
Again, we talked to Doug back in mid-October when we were still waiting to find out what would happen with the Social Security Fairness Act in Congress. In the very final hours of session in 2024, the US Senate followed the House's lead and passed that critically important bill to give full Social Security benefits to public employees who have also paid into the Social Security system through other jobs, or who are entitled to Social Security income through survivor benefits from their spouse's work. The now-former US Senator Sherrod Brown has the gratitude of so many public school educators in Ohio because of this work. He was a tireless champion for this legislation and the workers who would benefit throughout his time in Congress and the bill's passage in the final hours of his time in the US Senate, underscores a career of service to Ohio and Ohio's public school employees. The repeal of GPO/WEP has really been a long time coming, and it is the result of tireless advocacy of OEA members who worked to shine a spotlight on this issue and help their representatives in Congress understand why it is so important. We will continue to share conversations with the people who are shaping the public education landscape in our state as this season of the podcast continues, because in Ohio, public education matters.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai