JCTC celebrates five years of growth

A full five years into its life, Jessamine Career and Technology Center has five times the activity and is going strong as the staff continues to tackle new frontiers of career and technical education.

Principal Dexter Knight has overseen the school since ground was broken in 2005 and it opened in 2006. He said the mission and purpose of JCTC — which teaches elective classes to students from county high schools — was not crystal clear when staff members moved in.

“We really had no idea at the very beginning what our role was going to be, how we were going to fit into the big picture for high-school students,” he said. “It’s been growth over time.”

The growth happened quickly, as around 700 student registrations for classes doubled in the second year and has increased to more than 3,000 since.

The vision Knight had when JCTC opened was for a “high-tech” school — after all, he said, it has “technology” in its name.

“I think we’ve achieved that goal; I think it’s very technologically rich,” he said. “We’re always kind of pushing the envelope as much as we can. The students are several steps ahead of us, technologically speaking. I’m trying to stay current; we push our teachers to stay with them or maybe a little ahead of them, and I think we’ve achieved that and are still trying to achieve that.”

The school has developed programs new to the district like health services and an EMT certification while nurturing traditionally strong programs like agriculture. JCTC was named as one of the best places in the nation to learn about agriculture in the Progressive Farmer magazine in February 2010 after piloting a national agriculture curriculum in fall 2009.

One school-wide measure of success is the Kentucky Occupational Skills Standards Assessment, which includes assessments for each of several career areas. Knight said he was proud of the progress JCTC had made on the tests recently; results of this year’s tests came to the school in May.

The school saw twice as many students take KOSSA tests this year as two years ago, and 66 percent of the 197 students who took a test this year passed as opposed to only 58 percent of 95 students in the 2008-2009 school year.

“We’re really proud of our performance with that,” Knight said.

When JCTC was built, it served an important role as a centralized place for electives and also helped delay the possibility that a third high school would be needed, Superintendent Lu Young said.

“By providing that opportunity to have the career and technology offerings at JCTC, we didn’t have to expand either of the two high schools to be any larger than they already are, yet by simply busing them over, all high-schoolers in Jessamine County have the opportunity to participate in those high-quality programs,” she said. “I really do think that it is a dream-come-true programming opportunity for us as a district, very much like what we had in mind from the beginning.”

Bart Flener, an assistant principal and curriculum resource administrator, said the creation of JCTC was a logical move that was fiscally responsible.

“The goal, initially, was to build a host program so you didn’t have to duplicate like programs in two different places, and it made more sense and seemed to be better stewardship to host them in one place,” he said. “... it made more sense at the time, rather than hosting a class at East with 15 sports-marketing students and a class at West with 17 sports-marketing students, to host one sports-marketing class here with 32 students.”

The most recent comprehensive project in the school is the “Super Seven” — an effort to teach every student at JCTC relational and behavioral skills that are necessary in all careers. Flener said the staff had found in research that basic proper communication skills, called “soft skills,” were vitally important in jobs.

“It’s amazing how often soft skills come up — the ability to work with others, the ability to get along, communication, those type of things,” Flener said. “So we said, ‘Where in our system, if we’re going to get kids college and career ready, are we actively testing these soft-skills standards?’ We don’t. ... nobody really teaches a kid how to go about self-advocating and meeting a teacher after class in the right time, right place — we just hope that their parents teach them that, but they don’t.”

The Super Seven include conversational skills, non-verbal communication, acceptable digital communications, handling adversity and conflict resolution. Knight said these skills can be as important as technical skills.

“Employers want the soft-skills stuff, because that’s what keeps students employed and keeps them in jobs,” he said. “Where they really run into trouble is where they can’t handle adversity and they have a conflict with somebody, and they say, ‘Well, I quit; I’m just going to go find me another job,’ instead of working through it, problem-solving.”

The school piloted the program this spring after developing it in-house; Flener said it is his hope that in the coming years, each high-school student in Jessamine County will learn and be tested on soft skills.

“Hopefully, over time, we get to a point where any kid that has any class here at JCTC will leave knowing what the Super Seven are,” he said.

As the Kentucky Department of Education focuses on college and career readiness, JCTC eagerly awaits the chance to help more students be prepared for life after high school in the coming years.

“Our next big focus for five years is to really see how career and tech ed fits into the (college and career readiness) piece,” Knight said. “... They’re really still defining the definition of what college and career readiness is in Kentucky, so I think once we know that, then our big focus will be, ‘OK, what can we do to help our students really and truly be college and career ready?’”