May River High School junior Leah Smith built a radio system during a recent statewide mobile electronics competition in about 15 minutes.
Her eight competitors, all boys, took about an hour to build their radios.
Smith learned the circuitry skills and electrical concepts that led to her success at the Skills USA competition by enrolling in May River High’s automotive technology program, a four-course program offered in the Career and Technical Education (CATE) building on campus.
May River is the only Beaufort County high school with Automotive Technology classes. Offering these courses requires a space that better resembles a mechanic’s shop than a classroom.
Three other public high schools — Beaufort High, Bluffton High and Hilton Head Island High — stand to gain $5 million CATE buildings on their campuses if Saturday's $76 million referendum passes.
Including the CATE buildings on the referendum list took some by surprise. Superintendent Jeff Moss proposed a $118.5 million referendum for the summer of 2017. The list did not include CATE buildings.
Others have chalked up the CATE buildings, at least for Beaufort and Hilton Head high schools, as a way to generate more countywide support for the referendum. The other four items on the referendum's projects list are for Bluffton schools.
And the timeline to keep Beaufort-Jasper Academy for Career Excellence (ACE) open may be extended. The vocational school jointly operated by the neighboring school districts already offers automotive technology along with other programs, such as culinary and welding, that Beaufort County high schools stand to gain.
All of these points, put together, raise questions on the district’s need for three additional CATE buildings as it gears up to ask the public for $15 million to construct them.
'Ideal learning space’
Automotive technology is in high demand at May River, according to student enrollment and waitlist figures for all high school CATE courses. More than 150 students signed up to take one of the four courses in the 2017-18 school year but 80 enrollments were recorded.
“Parents in Bluffton are screaming that even though we have CATE at our schools, they can’t get in,” Beaufort County school board member Evva Anderson said at a February meeting.
District data on CATE enrollment for the 2017-18 school year also shows:
- Beaufort High School had the highest number of CATE course selections. It also had the highest number of enrollments — and that’s without a dedicated CATE building on its campus.
- May River, which already has its own CATE building, had the most students that selected a CATE course, but were not enrolled.
- Of the nearly 8,000 CATE course selections by students for the 2017-18 school year, about 78 percent of those first-choice requests were honored.
In about 1,700 cases, school administrators denied students’ request for a CATE course, but the reason for that may not necessarily be limited classroom space, district CATE director Karen Gilbert said.
Other reasons for denying a student’s CATE course selection may include scheduling conflicts with other courses required for graduation or a students needing to fulfill a prerequisite before taking the requested course. Gilbert said she did not have an estimate for how often each reason applied to the 1,700 CATE denials.
Gilbert declined to say which career pathways the district is planning to install at each school if the referendum passes. Instead, she said local and regional industry demands helps the district shape the direction of the program.
Battery Creek, for example, already has a dedicated CATE building on its campus that offers culinary and aviation and aerospace, but not automotive technology.
An internal district email obtained by The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette shows the four career pathways that may be offered at Bluffton High’s CATE facility are:
- Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC)
- Building construction trades
- Global logistics and supply chain management
- Public safety and emergency medical system
While some CATE courses, such as business classes, can be taught in a traditional classroom, true “skilled trades,” —welding, culinary and automotive technology — cannot be taught in a traditional classroom, Gilbert said.
“What’s an ideal learning space?” Gilbert asked. “Skills-based learning requires space. (A CATE environment) simulates real life.”
The number of students opting to enroll in CATE courses could grow as the S.C. Department of Education revamped its accountability standards in September, which expanded the ways school performance is measured.
Students can now meet “career readiness” indicators — such as completing a career pathway or earning a particular level on a skills-based exam — as an alternative to meeting a “college readiness” indicator, such as scoring a 20 or higher on the ACT or earning a three or higher on an Advanced Placement exam.
Staffing
In the 2016-17 school year, an engineering teacher position at May River remained vacant from January through May, according to personnel ratification reports, which raises the question of whether the district can find the additional teachers that would be needed if facilities are expanded.
Across the county’s six public high schools, there are a total of 67 CATE staff positions. Gilbert identified just two CATE teaching vacancies during the 2017-18 school year, both at Bluffton High.
These vacancies don’t take into account courses students signed up for that were then dropped from a school’s schedule.
The 2017-18 CATE course list shows 52 courses with 0 students enrolled, meaning the class was offered during course selection, but did not enroll students the following school year. This stems from either a lack of enough student interest in the course or because there wasn’t an instructor available to teach the course.
District records show that of the schools’ 190 CATE courses, 10 courses had 15 or more students sign up for the course, but none enrolled — an indicator that a teacher wasn’t available to offer it to students.
Gilbert said some of these courses could have been from staff vacancies, such as Bluffton High’s computer repair course. But in other cases, a school shifted its programming by phasing out some courses and offering others instead.
As of April 19, the district had posted four CATE teaching positions — two at Bluffton High and two at May River — to its online job board for the 2018-19 school year.
ACE’s future up in the air
A little over a year before ACE is scheduled to close, ACE director Michael Lovecchio pitched to both county school boards a way to keep the school open beyond its June 2019 expiration date.
The school already houses the equipment and facilities for many of the programs Beaufort County high schools may gain. ACE’s building includes a welding shop, culinary kitchen, barbering stations and a boatyard-style space for the school’s marine technology program.
For years, the boards have kept ACE afloat piecemeal, with timelines for closing the building pushed back, likely discouraging potential students from attending because its future has been in flux.
Of the 270 students enrolled at ACE this year, about 200 are from Beaufort County, Lovecchio said. That’s down from a few years ago when enrollment peaked to more than 400 students, a decline Lovecchio attributed at least in part to the uncertainty surrounding the school’s future.
Currently, ACE operates a half-day program for students with those zoned in the southern part of the county — as well as those from Jasper County’s sole high school — attending ACE in the morning and those in the northern part of the county attending in the afternoon. The students return to their feeder schools for the other half of the school day.
Lovecchio told the Beaufort County school board in February that the half-day set-up works “to a degree,” but busing to and from the schools each day isn’t working. This also limits the amount of field trip opportunities for students.
Instead, Lovecchio proposed a high tech career center students in either county could choose to attend full-time every other semester. On the off semesters, students would return to their feeder school. Throughout the entire semester, students could participate in extracurriculars at their feeder school.
“We’re not looking to compete with Beaufort and Jasper,” Lovecchio said Wednesday.
He said ACE offers a different type of environment for students. In Beaufort County, students take a course for 90 minutes a day, perhaps to explore if the career pathway interests them. At ACE, students have two hours and 40 minutes in their program.
The school can also offset capacity issues at Beaufort County schools. Lovecchio offered the example of Beaufort High students taking culinary courses at ACE because their program was already full.
But a survey taken by about 2,300 Beaufort County high school students last fall found that roughly 1,500 would prefer to take a technical course on their own campus. About 600 said they would prefer to take a technical course at ACE.
Jasper County’s school board unanimously approved Lovecchio’s proposal.
The Beaufort County school board voted 6-2-1, with board members John Dowling and Christina Gwozdz voting against and board member JoAnn Orischak abstaining. In explaining her vote, Orischak said it was “slightly premature” to vote on this before the referendum.
Their vote was not a commitment to keep ACE open under the new format, but to allow Lovecchio to present a more comprehensive plan to the board later this year.
This story was originally published April 19, 2018 3:52 PM.