GOLDEN TRIANGLE AREA, MS – Courtesy of the Dispatch
“At times, it seems like we are all running in different directions, often with the best of intentions,” said Ryan Miller, executive director of Accelerate Mississippi, part of a new state agency, Mississippi Office of Workforce Development. “As an organization with the mandate to coordinate all these efforts, the question is, ‘How do we get our arms around it?’” He and others have been working hard to coordinate communication between agencies that exist to help expose our middle and high school students to new and better professions and skills.
Katie McCrary – Courtesy Photo
“It’s cool stuff,” EMCC Communiversity director Courtney Taylor said. “We go into the classroom and challenge kids to solve a problem in the advanced hybrid electronics. Then we’ll bring the students to Communiversity to look at the equipment and the jobs. It’s also a way to expose students to careers that they’re just not exposed to in high school, like, say, a machinist. How can a high school teacher who has never been a machinist know that?”
The Communiversity will play host to the “FORGE Your Way To A Career Expo” on Oct. 27. The expo will be sponsored by The FORGE (Family Organizations Recruiting Great Employees) Foundation. It will expose students from around the GTR area to work with and learn more about many construction-related jobs and techniques that they might not otherwise have had access to. FORGE is made up primarily of local business owners.
CMSD Superintendent Cherie Labat spoke about the prior Expo, held in 2019: “I really can’t say enough about FORGE. It was great exposure for our students. . . The feedback we got from the students was wonderful. They had the opportunity to pour concrete, see and use tools, even hammer a nail. Some of our kids had never even done that before.”
Helping to prepare our youth for the future is good for them, good for our community, and has the potential to bring dividends for many years to come as horizons get expanded ever further. And THAT’S Good for Business!
Please click here for the original article: https://cdispatch.com/news/2021-09-04/workforce-development-schools-nonprofits-expose-students-to-skill-training-at-communiversity/