A pilot program in the Columbia School District will help students with some of the non-academic job skills that employers often find lacking: organization, goal setting, social skills and handling stress, for example.
Greg Smith, the district’s director of accountability, Superintendent Jason Harris and CHS Principal Braxton Stowe recently attended an ACT Workforce Summit in New Orleans and learned about the new Tessera program.
“Any workforce development that you go to, they say employees come out with very few soft skills,” the superintendent said. “It’s one of the huge weaknesses that is out there. I often hear that employers hire a person, and they can’t show up to work on time.”
He said after the sessions in New Orleans the presenter told them about the pilot to assess students in their abilities to do things that are important to employers and to academics.
“With our involvement, we also hope that it allows us an inside track into our training pilot,” Harris said. “They have beta tested it on a small scale, and they are about to unveil a larger scale study aimed at creating a playbook that teachers can use to help work with students and address social and emotional skill deficits. We’re pretty proud to be part of the pilot.”
It will be at the middle school and high school, and Columbia will be one of the few districts with a chance to participate, Harris said.
He said the schools need to focus more on career pathways than they sometimes do.
“We’re trying to be on the front end of that,” he said. “I think eventually we’d like to become one of the workforce ready communities that people are striving for.”
Smith spoke to the school board about the program recently, and Dr. Ronald Luethje, a school board member, asked questions.
“How does the model identify or address the diverse student population?” he asked.
“ACT has over the course of process has formulated the questions in a way to help determine it,” Smith said. “I know that the participating schools are rural, urban and suburban, so I imagine that by design, the questions removed biases. These are the same people that design the ACT questions.”
The test takes 30 minutes for students to take.
Smith said that by participating as a pilot, Columbia would be helping ACT with its data. He said there may be questions that students in different regions or areas respond differently to.
The board approved a memorandum of understanding to be a part of the program.
