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Building Bridges to
the Workplace
CORPORATE CITIZENS OF THE YEAR
By making support for education a priority, four firms helping
to enrich our communities and shape the future labor force
By Clement L. Russo
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Business New Haven
2/9/1998
By: Kevin Wheeler
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Whether you view it from a global perspective or a purely local one, education is vital to economic development and key to creating an environment in which business can prosper. It's no accident, for example, that the wealthiest countries record the highest levels of educational attainment, or that business expansions typically take off first in those areas - such as Silicon Valley or Route 128 - where there are outstanding schools and a highly educated labor force.
Business' stake in education was made clear last year in a report issued jointly by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Alliance of Business. The report concluded: “Our nation's future economic security and our ability to flourish as a democratic society demand a generation of high-school graduates with solid academic knowledge, world-class technical skills, conscientious work habits and eager, creative and analytical minds.”
But what happens when there's a gap between what students learn in school and the skills that businesses need? Traditionally, companies try to fill it through in-house training and development, and each year billions of dollars are spent to provide remedial education in an effort to raise employee capabilities to the levels businesses require.
Some companies, however, are taking a more far-reaching and civic-minded approach to education. In addition to their on-the-job training responsibilities, these organizations are becoming actively involved in public schools and local communities and investing heavily in educational programs that not only benefit them as businesses, but also have a long-term and positive social impact.
This year, with our Corporate Citizen of the Year Award, Business New Haven salutes four companies that are doing this in our area. Though the four differ significantly in size and function, all share an extraordinary commitment to improving education, as well as a strong belief in the power of volunteerism and the value of public-private partnerships.
Applied Engineering
Products (AEP)
Located just off Grand Avenue in Fair Haven, AEP employs about 125 people in the production of coaxial connectors, adapters and cable assemblies for the aviation, telecommunications, and test equipment industries. Retaining its ISO 9001 certification is crucial to AEP, so the company conducts ongoing training to build workplace skills. But this is one manufacturing enterprise where the focus of education goes far beyond quality control.
AEP maintains an on-site classroom, a company library and a full-time instructor. Here, without leaving the plant and on company time, employees can complete a GED or ESL program, brush up on their high school math, take college prep courses or sign up for private tutoring. For managers and engineers, the company has even provided courses in calculus and business writing.
Why the major investment in education? AEP President Ben Trivelli says he believes every company has a responsibility to contribute something - to its customers, to its employees, and to society. Besides, he adds, there's always a bottom-line payback when a company's workforce becomes more educated.
“If you have people who are learning, they enjoy a better quality of life,” he says. “And people who feel better about themselves do a better job.”
AEP's education program took off four years ago when Trivelli invited Nick Lavarato, an instructor with New Haven Adult Education, to join the company as its education department manager. Within two years, the number of employees who were taking classes reached 70, and there were seven courses being offered.
“We keep our classes small to provide as much individualized attention as possible, and enrollment is always voluntary,” explains Lavarato. “We try hard not to duplicate the school environment that our students remember from their teenage years. The last thing we want is for them to start having flashbacks about what it was like to be in school and to start thinking about all the reasons why they quit.”
Lavarato's efforts have produced impressive results. In only four years, the reading ability of AEP's hourly workers - most of them black and Hispanic women - has improved 100 percent, from a fourth-grade level to an eighth-grade level, and several employees have gone on to college courses (paid in full by AEP). Even older workers take advantage of these educational opportunities; last year, two long-tenured employees - one 65, the other 70 - received their high school equivalency diplomas.
AEP's enthusiasm for education benefits more than just its workers, however. The company has also “adopted” three local elementary schools: Strong School, Clinton Avenue School and Celantano School, whose students are mentally or physically challenged. Among other means of support, the company purchased memberships at $500 a year for each school in a non-profit organization that donates merchandise and supplies.
For the Clinton Avenue School, AEP sponsors the 10-week Little Scientists program, run by the New Haven Public Education Fund, and maintains a pen-pal partnership with students to improve their reading and writing abilities. For the Strong School, AEP donated two signs (the school previously had no name on its building) and supports programs that are run before and after regular school hours.
Working through the Enterprise Community, AEP also spearheaded a job-training initiative for out-of-school and out-of-work youths 18 and over. Eight companies now participate in the program, held at Eli Whitney technical school, which provides six months of training in the hard skills needed for employment in manufacturing - operating lathes and reading blueprints, for example - as well as training in critical soft skills such as problem solving, team building and interpersonal communication.
“The program runs five nights a week for six hours each night, and every student is provided with a stipend, transportation, a case worker and day care, if it's needed,” explains Lavarato. “When we started, we asked ourselves: What are the obstacles that participants are going to come up against? So we decided to include whatever ingredients it would take to make the program succeed.”
Lavarato acknowledges that AEP's commitment to education is unusual, but says he feels grateful to be working for a manufacturer with a vision and believes that it's important to create things - in more than just the industrial sense.
“We operate here under the philosophy that a strong person, a strong company and a strong community make a strong city,” he says. “And we try to do whatever we can to strengthen any of those components.”
BHC Company
Formerly known as Bridgeport Hydraulic Co., BHC is the largest investor-owned water utility in New England and one of the ten largest in the nation. Founded in 1857, it supplies water to 500,000 customers in New Haven, Fairfield and Litchfield counties and maintains a strong service mission - one that applies not only to customers but also to the communities they live in.
“As a water utility, we can't just pick up and leave,” says Larry Bingaman, vice president of corporation relations for BHC and its parent, Aquarion. “We can't remove our pipes from the ground and go somewhere else. So it behooves us to help and improve the communities we operate in, and that's part and parcel of our whole education program.”
Today that program encompasses a range of community activities that rely on the volunteer efforts of nearly half the company's 250 employees. They include:
Read-A-Loud Day, a yearly event that brings BHC employees into Bridgeport elementary schools to participate in reading and math lessons.
Project Santa, a Yuletide outreach effort in which BHC employees dress up as Santa and his elves and distribute gifts to students.
Black History and Hispanic Heritage Months, annual observances that involve BHC employees in citywide festivities to recognize the accomplishments of African Americans and celebrate Hispanic culture.
The Twinleaf/CATCH Mentoring Program, an intensive, community-based initiative, co-sponsored by the Bridgeport Board of Education, that pairs students in grades four to eight with adult professionals and retired mentors.
“We think we have a good, well-rounded program that gives something back to our communities,” says Bingaman. “And we believe strongly in partnering with other organizations because, generally speaking, the communities we serve don't have the resources to meet all the needs and demands that are placed on them in the education area.”
BHC's involvement with education began nearly a decade ago when the company entered Bridgeport's Adopt-a-School Program and was teamed up with Barnum Elementary School - a natural match, since P.T. Barnum once served as the company's president. Since then, BHC has also become a corporate sponsor for the Aquaculture School, a regional and alternative secondary school in Bridgeport that specializes in marine sciences.
“What we have to offer is a vast amount of environmental areas - including reservoirs, streams and water courses - that can serve as a kind of outdoor classroom,” explains Fred Gliesing, BHC's manager of environmental management. “By working directly in the field, students from the school can learn about stream ecology, fish migration and other aspects of the marine environment.”
Not surprisingly, many of the outreach activities BHC sponsors are designed to promote respect for natural resources. BHC has developed a partnership with Save the Sound, for example, a regional awareness-raising group that focuses on preserving Long Island Sound and sponsors performances in local schools by the Small Change Theater Drama Troupe that teach students about water conservation and protecting the environment.
In 1993 the company helped establish the Aquarion Environmental Studies scholarship to encourage women and minorities to enter the environmental sciences, and recently founded a scholarship, named after former BHC director Eugene Jones, to help minority students become engineers. BHC also underwrites an environmental studies scholarship at Sacred Heart University and contributes to the environmental sciences curriculum at the University of New Haven.
Other programs the company supports have a broader objective: to help students grow emotionally, psychologically and socially. In partnership with the Bridgeport Board of Education, for instance, BHC provided start-up funds to launch the Connecticut chapter of Faces, an improvisational theater group that performs short plays in local high schools and focuses on contemporary teenage issues such as drug abuse, gang violence and peer pressure.
“We devote a lot of time and resources to education because it reinforces our mission and engenders a feeling among our employees that community service is the right thing to do,” says Bingaman. “Besides, since we draw from our local communities for people to come and work with us, we want to make sure that kids in our area are aware of different job opportunities, gain respect for our environment and, when the time comes to choose a career, think about us in a positive way.”
Bayer Corporation
As you'd expect from an organization of its size and stature, Bayer Corp., whose pharmaceutical division is headquartered in West Haven, conducts a variety of educational outreach activities that are strongly focused, thoughtfully designed and highly integrated. But it wasn't always that way.
“There have been education outreach efforts at Bayer for a number of years, but many of them were conducted solely at the grassroots level,” explains Keith Kelley, Bayer's education outreach coordinator. “Employees who wanted to share their enthusiasm for science would go into local classrooms or bring children into work for on-site demonstrations.”
That kind of in-person, hands-on approach to teaching science has evolved into a formal, nationwide company program called Making Science Make Sense. So far, Bayer has introduced components of the program into 34 school districts throughout the country - as well as in the company's new on-site day care center in West Haven - and has become one of the most visible and zealous proponents of science literacy.
“In order to succeed in an increasingly complex, technology-driven world, people today need to be self-motivated and capable of applying critical-thinking skills to problem solving - the very skills that are learned through the scientific process,” says David Ebsworth, president of the pharmaceutical division. “Science literacy is an issue that affects everyone: Bayer's customers, the communities in which we operate, our employees and the future of the company itself.”
As Bayer's education efforts began to gel, the company initiated collaborations with some of the nation's most prestigious science organizations - among them, the National Science Foundation and the National Science Resources Center - to educate the public about the importance of science and how it should be taught. To promote its message, Bayer has conducted wide-reaching campaigns through print advertising, science competitions and radio programs, and is one of the most prominent sponsors of National Science & Technology Week.
Bayer's local education efforts take a number of forms. One is the Partners in Science program now being implemented in three elementary schools in West Haven and Orange. Over the past two years, the program has brought 60 Bayer scientists into the classroom to conduct experiments that demonstrate the importance of science to students and how it impacts their everyday lives.
Bayer is also a strong supporter of the Seafaring Scientists program, run during summer months by Schooner Inc. in New Haven. As part of the program, Bayer scientists sail on the schooner Quinnipack to teach students about marine biology, the ecology of Long Island Sound and the effects of pollution on water quality. Bayer provides the financial support that allows 35 inner-city students to spend a week aboard the ship each summer.
“Already, more than 100 of our scientists and technical experts participate in our education outreach efforts,” explains Kelley. “But we're now developing materials and training that will make it possible for any of our 2,000 employees to conduct similar activities, whether it's in a classroom, a scout pack or a church youth group.”
To underscore the importance of these programs, Bayer has conducted national surveys with teachers, students and business leaders to determine attitudes toward science education and assess expectations. “Our surveys clearly indicate that there's a need to increase science literacy,” says Kelley. “HR executives, for example, told us they didn't feel students were being properly prepared for entry-level jobs and that children need to learn differently in order to face today's work challenges.”
To help facilitate the school-to-work transition, Bayer works with the Regional Work Force Development Board to provide internships to local students in their junior and senior years of college and has developed a program called Inroads Interns, which targets financially disadvantaged students. The company also funds scholarships at UNH and Yale and provides tuition, room and board, and summer internships for the Nutmeg Scholar at the University of Connecticut.
“One of the things we hope these programs do is to demonstrate that Bayer is a good corporate citizen and that we take our civic responsibilities seriously,” says Kelley. “We work hard with organizations and individuals in our communities to improve education, and we want people to realize that we're not just a big corporation sitting up on the hill.”
A-1 Toyota
A-1 Toyota owner Domenic Galardi is a man shaped by his past - a tough neighborhood, and a good education.
The son of Italian immigrants from Amalfi, Galardi had it better than other kids raised among the factories on Wooster Street because his parents were able to send him to parochial schools and then to college at UConn.
“I don't think I was any smarter than the other children,” says Galardi, “I was just fortunate. Ironically, a lot of them ended up in what we used to call 'opportunity rooms,' to become carpenters and plumbers.”
What bothers Galardi looking back is that there seemed to be a difference between the academic teachers and the vocational teachers, with the academics looking down on the technicians. Says Galardi, “I always thought business people and educators could do a better job together.”
So, in 1994 when a New Haven Board of Education official named Bosley encouraged Galardi to get involved with improving the education system through partnerships with businesses, Galardi “adopted” the Transitional High School on Ella Grasso Boulevard.
Unlike other sponsors that tended to be large corporations with an army of employees and deep pockets, Galardi went in on a grassroots level to personally try to engage the students. He talked to the kids about how he built his business, and how they too could make their own futures.
“Some people don't think they can succeed because of where they come from,” he says. “But this is the land of opportunity for anyone - if you put your mind to it.”
After he made that first connection with the students, he says, he was “hooked.” In addition to adopting the Transitional School, Galardi now serves on three education boards: the Eli Whitney Regional Vocation Technical School's citizen advisory board to improve curriculum and work programs; the advisory committee for Gateway Community Technical College's automotive program; and, most recently, the New Haven Public Education Fund to expand and improve partnerships between corporations and schools.
It's not often that you hear good things about car dealers, but Galardi is an exception. Says Roy C. Francis, head of Gateway College's automotive program: “The English language doesn't have the words to describe how wonderful Galardi is.
“In 30 years of teaching, I've never met anyone who cares more or understands more about education and industry. My opinion of him is so high, I'm thrilled to know him on a personal and professional level.”
Francis says that Galardi's contributions assume many forms. He's given personal time to speak to the students as the owner of an auto dealership about their futures, donated diagnostic equipment and, perhaps most importantly, he gives one or two students a year the chance to do their requisite 20-week internship at his dealership, with pay. And as testament to the program, five of his current mechanics are Gateway graduates.
Cecil Robinson, director of the Eli Whitney Regional Vocation Technical School in Hamden, has similar praise for Galardi. “He is one of the most caring businessmen I know,” says Robinson. “Unselfish in terms of his time and generosity. He has donated from A-1 Toyota computers that analyze engines, parts, shop manuals and materials, and he sits on our citizens advisory board. He helps us in terms of connecting us to the business community and the networking needs of the school. He's been on the board for three years, but his company has been connected to the school for years. And he's been essential in connecting us with Toyota [Motor Co.] as well.”
His ties to Toyota are, of course, significant. Francis estimates that the Toyota Motor Co. has given it somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million through cars, equipment, manuals and direct contributions. And although Robinson didn't put a dollar amount on it, he too can list the same kinds of contributions from the company.
Giving comes in many forms, and Galardi's contributions have made a difference for the schools and their students. But in addition to his concern for the future of kids, why else did Galardi get involved? “I believe the more learned people are, the better the economy,” he says. BNH
- Kevin Wheeler
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