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Training Tomorrow’s Workers Today
New school-to-work partnership gives students a clue about business
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Business New Haven
10/9/1995
By: BNH
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Historically, businesses say schools don't prepare students for the workplace. And schools say business hasn't told them what they want.
Well, the complaints didn't entirely fall on deaf ears. In 1994, Congress enacted the School-To-Work Opportunities Act to reform education in order to better prepare students for work. They even backed it with funding. According to Judith Andrews, project director of the New Haven-area School-To-Work Opportunities Initiative (STWO Initiative), the legislation established, among other things, competitive grants - one for states and one for local communities (School-to-Work Local Partnership Implementation Grants). Connecticut was unsuccessful in its bid for a grant, but greater New Haven wasn't.
The Regional Workforce Development Board/New Haven Private Industry Council and area educators and representatives from business and industry joined forces and wrote a successful grant that won one of 15 awards. Worth $499,000, the grant is based on a five-year funding cycle with a sunset clause that diminishes funding each year. The grants come with few restrictions, explains Andrews, allowing communities to develop school-to-work initiatives based on needs.
The STWO Initiative established ten- to 12-week paid internships for students in companies or offices where students expressed an interest and tied it to school-based learning. In some cases, students took job-related classes that also qualified for college credit.
Andrews emphasizes Gateway Community-Technical College's role in the initiative, bending over backwards to find relevant classes for a student who was interested in law (even though its focus is in science and technology). Getting more post-secondary institutions involved in the school-to-work initiative is key, she says.
The School-to-Work initiative is not a high school-to-workforce plan. It's about developing a better workforce through a good education and establishing careers. Andrews cites statistics that reveal that 50 percent of high school students go straight to the workforce. Of the 50 percent that continue their education, 60 percent drop out after two years for various reasons, including uncertainty about career choices. She would like to mitigate that trend, and school-to-work internships are exploratory, not jobs. However, businesses do pay students - sometimes minimum wage, sometimes more.
Mentors in the workplace make sure students get to experience all career aspects involved in their particular industry. The head of Herlin Press took an interest in the program and personally mentored its intern.
The first internships were largely in biomedical and technology fields. Options have grown as the program has evolved. Students can now intern in business technologies, pharmaceuticals, marketing, graphics and drafting, finance, health and, most recently, law.
At first, the STWO Initiative had more volunteer businesses than students. Word spread quickly, though, and this year it had more students than businesses with internships at informational seminars designed to lure participants. After one year, the STWO Intiative includes 248 students in six high schools, 124 internships and 50-60 businesses. Teachers are interning in businesses for several days to learn what businesses need, getting personal views of what they need to teach and what curriculum to develop.
Anderson points out that the STWO initiative is not for at-risk students. Students from New Haven and Branford, although from different environments, have futures, need jobs and can benefit from applied leaning and mentors.
They're Not All Leaving
Love conquers all as anti-corrosive manufacturer chooses Hamden
On September 28, PermaStop Rust of America Inc. President Randy Webster announced the intention of the company to build a new plant in Hamden at the Hamden Industrial Park. There the company will manufacture and distribute PermaStop Rust, an anti-corrosion control paint that the company says is able to soak into metal surfaces and form a bond with the metal.
The anti-corrosion agent was created and has previously been marketed in Europe. Webster indicated that the family of the product's inventors decided to license the product for distribution internationally, and Webster's new company gained the rights for the Western Hemisphere. The company hopes to be up and running in early 1996.
Said Hamden Mayor Lillian Clayman, “The timetable is a little aggressive, but the site is at an existing building in an industrial park, and in Hamden we have a process to facilitate working with the various departments involved.”
“We hope to have the plant up by January with a staff of 45 people,” Webster explained. “We'll be looking for engineers and marketing people as well as plant personnel. The investment to buy the building and the equipment is in the $750,000 to $1 million range.”
Webster said he chose Connecticut after searching out locations in several states. He described meetings with economic-development officials as “helpful”; indeed, the state's Department of Transportation is testing the anti-corrosion material on a bridge in Rocky Hill. Even so, Webster, who began his location search while living in Florida, indicated that one reason for bringing his company to Connecticut was personal. “I was at the Volvo Tennis Tournament and met someone here and eventually we got engaged. She said, 'Take a look at what we have here.'”
Not Down in the Valley
Communities come together to address economic, quality-of-life issues
First, there was the “Vision” project, by which cities like New Haven, Waterbury and Meriden sought to refocus community priorities through a grass-roots organizing process. Now there's “Healthy Valley 2000,” in which the Naugatuck Valley communities of Ansonia, Beacon Falls, Derby, Oxford, Seymour and Shelton are coming together to make the Valley “a better place in which to live, work, raise a family and enjoy life by measurably improving the life and health of the community and its residents.
The effort, launched one year ago and planned to continue into 1996, was funded by grants of $100,000 from the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven and $37,000 from the Katharine Matthies Foundation in Seymour, with in-kind support from the Valley United Way, which also serves as the group's fiduciary agent. It is headed by two lifelong Valley residents, Michael J. Adanti of Ansonia, president of Southern Connecticut State University, and Shelton's Jodi Ann Hinman, executive director of the Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce.
In its first year, Healthy Valley hired a project coordinator, recruited a 160-member “stakeholder” group to guide the project, undertook a community health profile to assess the quality of life in such areas as education, health care, arts and recreation and the economy, and conducted a survey of perceptions of Valley residents and others.
One thing the latter revealed is that Valley residents hold their community in higher esteem than they think outsiders do. While almost three-quarters of respondents rated the Valley as a “good,” “very good” or “excellent” place to live, nearly half of the same group felt that “others” would rate the community as either “fair” or “poor” as a place to live, work or shop.
The same group expressed serious concerns about the Valley's economy. Three-quarters believed that job opportunities were in short supply, while two-thirds expressed the opinion that the area's economy was “not strong.” The bright news is that support for the six communities, which are home to 96,000 residents in about 100 square miles, to work together on economic development issues was “overwhelming.”
Sometime next year, a report will be issued identifying highest priority issues and needs, with the goal of targeting existing resources toward them and acquiring new resources to develop and enhance programs and services.
SOM Taps Clinton Official as New Dean
Former Shearson Lehman director Garten to take reins Nov. 1
On November 1, the Yale University School of Management (SOM) will have a new dean. Jeffrey E. Garten, U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade and a former managing director of Shearson Lehman Brothers and the Blackstone Group, was named to the post September 28 by Yale President Richard C. Levin.
The 48-year-old Clinton administration official, who at Commerce managed a staff of 2,500 and 140 national and foreign offices of the International Trade Administration, was active in efforts to focus U.S. trade policy on such large emerging markets as China, India and Brazil, was a proponent of closer commercial ties to the European Union, and participated in U.S. auto trade negotiations with Japan. Garten will also join SOM's faculty, where he will concentrate in the areas of international trade and finance.
As a managing director of Shearson Lehman Brothers from 1979 to 1992, he opened and expanded that firm's Tokyo office and oversaw the financing of the Hong Kong cross-harbor tunnel, at the time the largest public finance project in Asia. Garten's management expertise at Shearson Lehman was concentrated on debt restructuring, corporate reorganization and mergers and acquisitions.
Garten's government service from 1972-78 included the White House Council on International Policy in the Nixon administration and the State Department Policy Planning Staff for Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance, where he focused on international trade and finance. He is the author of A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany and the Struggle For Supremacy.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Garten received his masters and doctoral degrees from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. From 1968-72 he was a captain in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
Garten succeeds Acting Dean Stanley Garstka, who has headed SOM since August 1994. “My hope is to lead the Yale School of Management into the 21st century,” said Garten in an announcement. “This is a great opportunity to train leaders who are on the cutting edge of the ideas and skills necessary to meet the challenges of a brutally competitive global economy.
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