MANHATTAN — Kansas is watching.
Educators from across the state are keeping an eye on Iola High School students as they take the lead in programs that allow students to explore career options while still in high school, said Natalie Clark, who works with the Kansas Department of Education’s Career and Technical Education division.
Clark was among those who attended a workshop designed and led by eight IHS senior interns at the Annual Kansas CTE Conference Tuesday in Manhattan. The students taught a roomful of school administrators from across the state about the real-world skills they have learned this year while working as interns at Iola businesses.
“For these students to be able to articulate what they’ve done and share it with educators is very powerful. It’s nice to have that student perspective,” Clark said.
Some students who have been interning at Allen County Regional Hospital plan to pursue careers in health care.
Those with business in mind have interned at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center and Iola Area Chamber of Commerce, as well as at a local dance studio and a clothing boutique.
Another spends her days at Allen County District Court where she shadows Chief District Judge Dan Creitz to see if the law piques her interests.
They all shared stories of their experiences at the Tuesday conference, with some common themes:
Their internships gave them a preview of their preferred career choice. For some, the experience confirmed they were on the right path in their studies. For others, they came away with a better realization of what they might want to do with the rest of their lives.
Their internships gave them a more realistic view of the job requirements they’ll face once they graduate from college and join the day-to-day workforce. Maybe they had no idea there would be so much paperwork involved. Maybe they didn’t realize cleaning someone’s wound could be so… well… gross.
And their internships taught them valuable lessons about who they want to be and what they want to do, before they invest thousands — or tens or even hundreds of thousands — of dollars on a college education.
Saturday, The Register will take a more in-depth look at each of those individual presentations.
THE INTERNSHIP program is just one facet of the Career and Technical Education program at IHS, which also offers certification courses in welding, building trades and wind energy technology at the Rural Regional Technical Center at LaHarpe.
IHS also received a three-year grant, in collaboration with Chanute High School, to send students into area industries to receive on-the-job training for technical jobs that are hard to fill and very much in demand.
The student workforce training program goes a step beyond the internships, training students as employees rather than job shadowing. Just one IHS student is currently part of that program, which began at the start of the second semester.
