‘Action plan’ needed to connect students to jobs

FAST LEARNERS: Andrea Castaneda, second from right, heads Accelerating School Performance at the R.I. Department of Education. She has focused on overhauling the state’s technical training to include IT work instead of just automotive and culinary skills. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
FAST LEARNERS: Andrea Castaneda, second from right, heads Accelerating School Performance at the R.I. Department of Education. She has focused on overhauling the state’s technical training to include IT work instead of just automotive and culinary skills. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Marcia Sullivan, the executive director of the East Greenwich Housing Authority, came to the Providence Business News summit on Employers & Education Nov. 7 with the hope of finding an answer to how she might assist many of her residents, ages 35-55, find secure employment.
Sullivan said the panel, “Mid-Skill Jobs – What Employers Need/What Students are Learning,” was a compelling discussion of the complexities in attempts to retool education for the needs of a skilled workforce in Rhode Island. One take-away for her was the need to engage directly with employers and businesses to establish internships and partnerships to give her residents a potential leg up.
Yet, Sullivan also voiced frustration the demographic of her residents didn’t fit into the conversation. “How do you find the skills training for a single parent who is over 40 with two kids?” she asked.
The morning after President Barack Obama’s re-election, the conversation about how to build a better workforce for tomorrow was frank and direct, where those with strong opposing views attempted to find common ground. The panel participants wrestled with potential solutions to overcome the growing gap in the need for an increasingly skilled workforce in Rhode Island and the lack of educational attainment of students.
The panel included Ray Di Pasquale, president of the Community College of Rhode Island, Andrea Castaneda, in charge of accelerating school performance at the R.I. Department of Education, Steven Adams, a partner at the law firm of Taylor Duane Barton & Gilman LLP, Brandon Melton, senior vice president of HR at Lifespan, Dennis Littky, co-founder of The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (Met), and Pierre La Perriere, senior vice president at Gilbane Inc.
The sharpest contrast in approaches was drawn between Littky and Castaneda.
Castaneda, who oversees middle and high school reform, career and technical education, and virtual learning, stressed the need to develop competence in math skills, such as long division, and to have teachers and students work together to improve performance on standardized testing. She described her efforts to overhaul the state’s technical-training infrastructure to focus on IT training, instead of just automotive and culinary skills. “We can’t just test and assign letter grades,” she said. “We also have to connect students to the workplace.”
Littky said the key to learning was being able to unleash a student’s passion and creativity, through which the reading and math skills would more easily be learned, promoting an entrepreneurial spirit. He described the importance of the the Met’s approach in placing students into the workplace, two days a week, having developed a network of 2,200 businesses.
Melton, who has worked in human resources for 39 years at Lifespan, the state’s largest private employer, touted the efforts of the hospital’s programs to engage teenagers from Rhode Island’s urban communities in a summer work program, creating a talent pipeline for young people into employment at the hospital. The key to the program’s success, according to Melton, was in its ability to teach what many refer to as the soft skills – being on time, dressing appropriately, politeness – what he called “core success skills” to finding employment.
“We can teach these skills in two days,” he said. “It doesn’t take 12 years.”
Many students who attend classes at CCRI, Di Pasquale said, need to take additional development courses to come up to the skill level to compete at the college level. But the development courses are not counted as credits toward a degree, so that students often spend their limited financial resources on these classes. Instead of a three-year time period to graduate from CCRI, most students take seven years to graduate, he said.
Di Pasquale said that the time had come to do more than just talk about the problems. “We need an action plan, not a talking plan.” Adams, a lawyer whose practice is focused on education law, employment and labor matters, emphasized the need for “grit” as a characteristic of success.
Littky agreed that “grit” was an important factor, talking about the resilience of many of his students in overcoming real-life barriers. Four of his students had been shot and killed during the summer as a result of violence on the streets of Providence, one of whom was riding his bike at the wrong time in the wrong place. “They learn resilience and grit,” he said. “How do you teach that?”
Littky also noted that while Massachusetts received praise for the way that it had increased the performance of students on standardized tests by 2 percent, little attention got paid to the fact that its drop-out rate had increased at the same time by 12 percent.
La Perriere spoke about the importance of companies developing relationships with future employers through internships, saying that it was a determining factor in recruiting and retaining talent.
During the question and answer period following the discussion, Trudy Mandeville, president and CEO of Techcomm Partners, asked the panel about what she perceived as a big gap: the absence of small business on the panel. Mandeville lauded the efforts of Lifespan and its ability to invest $350,000 in its summer program, but for a small business such as hers, those kinds of resources were not available. Melton, in turn, reached out to her, and asked for her business card.
Castaneda, in answer to another question, said it was important to address the expectations of parents, changing the traditional way that they often measure their children’s progress in school.
Rick Brooks, executive director of the R.I. Governor’s Workforce Board, praised the quality of the panel’s discussion and the way that it explored the competing pressures of expectations and resources. “They did a good job of dissecting the complexity of the challenges to educate and prepare people for jobs,” he said. •

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