This commentary is by Clifton Long, who lives in the town of Washington and teaches building mechanical systems at the Center for Technology in Essex.
Gov. Scott, in his 2023 budget address, spoke eloquently about the essential role vocational education has played in his success.
Yet this year, as in the past few years, hundreds (yes, hundreds!) of Vermont high school students will be denied that opportunity because Vermont lacks the teachers, the equipment, and the instructional space in our Career and Technical Education Centers.
In addition, sending (aka “home”) high schools often face additional costs to send their students to a CTE center; there are expensive redundancies between CTE centers and home high schools; and, most centers are inefficiently governed by local high school boards.
On top of all this is the lingering stigma of non-college postsecondary learning and employment goals.
There are some obvious barriers to teacher recruitment in technical education. Teachers who lack a college degree will make far less than they can in industry. Even those at the top of the pay scale, which requires a master’s degree, 30 additional academic credits, and 10-plus years of experience, often make less than experienced industry professionals, yet those professionals are the very people we need (and want!) to teach our students.
To underscore the arbitrariness and inequities in the pay scale, consider the following. An electrician needs six years of trade experience supervised by a master licensed electrician, plus four years of apprenticeship classes, or a total of about 13,000 hours of work and study.
To earn a bachelor’s degree in teaching, prospective educators spend about 3,000 hours studying their specialization (say, history or math), and about half that in educator courses.
If a licensed tradesperson completes an educator-training program, they’ve certainly logged an amount of training more than equal to a bachelor’s degree. But current teacher contracts don’t recognize this equivalence and CTE centers are hobbled in their efforts to attract tradespeople because contracts lack a provision to pay them based on their training and expertise.
Regarding tuition: A home high school pays the CTE tuition costs of each student it sends to a CTE center. The home high school is then reimbursed by the state, but only up to the amount of the home school’s per-student cost, not the CTE’s per-student cost. The home school must make up the difference if the CTE tuition is more, which is often the case.
Public schools face tight budgeting constraints and saddling them with additional costs can understandably discourage them from enrolling students in CTE, even if that’s where a student would thrive. In addition, CTE centers are paid tuition based on a rolling six-semester average whereby the total funding fluctuates every year, complicating budgeting.
Tech center facilities are woefully outdated. Most labs are too small, and equipment is often not state of the art. New, larger centers could be paid for from the sizable economies of scale possible from unifying and consolidating CTE centers across the state. Larger centers could offer sports, greater student support, and deeper programming.
CTE students are usually bused first to their home school, only to then board a second bus to their tech center. If tech centers could grant diplomas, which is currently not allowed, it would eliminate costly and time-wasting redundancies, including this double-busing scenario.
Regarding governance: Most tech centers are governed by the school district board where they happen to be located. Local high school boards owe their primary allegiance to their respective high schools and cannot adequately or equitably govern tech centers — nor should they be expected to. A statewide CTE district would allow sending school representation for every center with a dedicated state board made up of representatives from each center.
The current job market practically ensures the availability of high-wage, high-skill, high-demand careers for our tech center graduates. Students with excellent career prospects in Vermont are more likely to stay in Vermont. These careers will then generate significant tax revenue for the state, both from the workers and their employers. Everybody wins.
Addressing these challenges and inequities and making the necessary changes will require bold and enlightened action from not less than the governor, the Legislature, our congressional delegation, the Vermont Agency of Education, and the Vermont Teachers Union (VT-NEA).
These entities owe it to all of our students, particularly those who do not have the chance to attend a tech center this year, to act soon and decisively. Tech education in Vermont must be improved. There are solutions and there are viable paths to achieve them.
As a CTE plumbing, heating and electrical teacher with 30-plus years of industry experience and 8 years of teaching experience, I know firsthand the transformative effect that skill acquisition and bright career prospects can have on students. Few initiatives can be expected to return our investment with such high economic and social rewards.
The dramatic changes necessary to take advantage of this opportunity may be controversial. Regardless, all stakeholders must work cooperatively and with an unfaltering commitment to providing educational opportunities that will benefit our students and our communities as a whole. All significant societal improvements, like those suggested here, demand nothing less.
