Enrollments are trending downward in most school districts in the Upper Valley. With fewer students, the competition for them, and for the resources that support their education, has increased.
While technical centers have always had to recruit students, now traditional high schools are joining the game, said Robert St. Pierre, director of River Bend Career and Technical Center in Bradford, Vt.
“Everybody is now competing,” St. Pierre said in a phone interview, noting that a recent school fair in Piermont, which does not operate a high school, drew representatives from as far away as Lebanon.
Technical centers, in general, have seen much smaller enrollment declines than traditional high schools. In spite of this gentle push-pull relationship between high schools and their more career-oriented counterparts, educators stress that students make their own decisions about whether to pursue technical education, regardless of funding.
When technical center programs fit in with a student’s plans, South Royalton School Principal Dean Stearns said it makes sense for them to attend.
“There’s a financial piece to it that doesn’t come into the equation at all,” said Stearns, who taught public safety and coordinated work-based learning for the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center and directed River Bend before coming to South Royalton. “I can’t replicate that program for what it costs to send them there.”
South Royalton has budgeted $70,600 for technical center tuition for the current school year, out of a budget of $6.15 million, Stearns said. This year, 16 of about 65 juniors and seniors are attending a technical center in either Randolph or Hartford, he said. Randolph Technical Career Center is Royalton’s designated center, but if a student wants to enroll in a program in Hartford that Randolph doesn’t offer, students can opt to go there, Stearns said.
He cautioned against dividing the cost by the number of students because costs are based on a six semester average of the students attending the centers, which cushions both sending schools and technical centers from major budget swings.
The number of students choosing to attend technical centers fluctuates based on the composition of the junior and senior classes, Stearns said.
“It ebbs and flows,” he said.
Because students develop personalized learning plans in middle school, administrators like Stearns usually have an idea of which kids might attend a technical center later on, he said.
A Slower Decline
Though interest varies year to year, enrollment in technical centers has declined more slowly than overall high school enrollment in Vermont and New Hampshire, meaning the percentage of students opting for technical programs is going up.
In Vermont, while overall school enrollment has declined from 93,925 in 2005-2006 to 84,433 this school year, the percentage of juniors and seniors participating in regular technical center programs has increased from about 26 percent in 2006 to 29 percent in 2016. Likewise, the percentage of freshmen and sophomores participating in introductory programs at technical centers rose from about 6 percent in 2006 to more than 11 percent in 2016, according to data from the state Agency of Education.
Bucking the trend of enrollments dropping at a lower rate for technical centers than for sending high schools is Claremont’s Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center. The number of students in Stevens High School dropped from 707 students in 2005-06 to 546 in the current year, a loss of almost 23 percent. In the same period, the technical center saw enrollment dip 28 percent, from 180 to 129 students. Since 2011, the technical center’s enrollment has been trending downward.
There are several factors contributing to this decline, including a move by two of the original five sending high schools — Kearsarge Regional High School and Fall Mountain Regional High School — to send their students to other technical centers.
The schedules of the remaining three schools — Stevens, Newport and Sunapee — don’t line up well with the tech center’s, and transportation is hard to coordinate, Joel Schneid, the center’s director, said in a recent phone interview.
The Claremont center also has lost staff, space and programs over the years, which may mean that fewer students find what they’re looking for, Schneid said. Resources are tight, in part, because state reimbursements to technical centers have decreased over the years, he said.
“We’re eating it,” Schneid said. “Because we realize that some schools will make that decision to not send.”
In 2001, the center had seven full-time teachers and now has the equivalent of four and a half. The center formally offered eight programs, including business systems networking, child care and guidance, culinary arts, building and construction, plumbing and pipefitting, machine shop technology, accounting and general office skills. It now offers only six programs. The center also offers exploratory courses for younger students.
Increasingly rigorous state standards have meant that some students have to spend more time in traditional classroom settings and cannot take advantage of the center’s programs, Schneid said.
Hands-on Appeal
This semester, Stevens High School junior Chandler Zullo is installing a state-of-the-art pellet boiler in the Claremont technical center’s heating and plumbing lab. The project is an extended learning opportunity, which Zullo is working on in addition to regular course work requiring him to install an oil-burning boiler.
Once complete, the wood pellet boiler, in combination with solar panels on the roof, will heat the lab and all of the center’s hot water, Zullo said in an interview in the lab earlier this month.
One of the things Zullo likes about the heating and plumbing program is working with modern technologies such as the green and gray pellet boiler made by Maine Energy Systems.
“There’s always something new,” he said.
Zullo also likes that his coursework is preparing him for a career. He is one of a group of students studying for a bronze certification through the National Oilheat Research Alliance, a Virginia-based industry group. He plans to take the test at the end of the school year to get his “foot in the door for a company,” he said.
Zullo, who plays on Stevens’ soccer team, plans to graduate mid-way through next year and to find a job in heating and plumbing in the Claremont area. He anticipates that it will be easy to find work in his chosen field.
“It’s a really good trade,” he said. He also noted that the average age of people in the profession is around 55, so companies are looking for younger workers to replace those who retire.
Guidance counselors have encouraged him to consider college, and he said he expects he’ll be able to continue his education while he works, hopefully with financial assistance from his employer.
“I’m not trying to sound greedy,” he said. “But it’s smart.”
Mark Pichette, Thetford Academy’s director of counseling services, said it can be difficult for students who aim to pursue a four-year college degree to attend a technical center.
It is challenging for students to complete both a technical program and the courses required for college preparation, Pichette said. There are additional math and science courses students aiming for a four-year university need, he said.
But, he acknowledged, some technical programs, such as Hartford’s new Science, Technology, Engineering and Math program might be compatible with college preparation, he said.
Since 2010, the number of students TA has sent to technical centers has ranged from a high of 40 to a low of 17, Pichette said. The school generally has about 300 students in grades 7 through 12, he said.
“I just think that we have to be open and honest with students about their choices,” Pichette said. “If we do it well, (we) provide the roadmap in front of them and show where it can lead.”
Different Approaches To Experiential Learning
Technical centers and their sending high schools also have different philosophies when it comes to how community-based learning experiences fit in with classroom coursework.
As high schools adopt flexible pathways to graduation, part of the 2013 Vermont law Act 77, there are a growing number of alternatives to traditional classrooms and technical center programs, said Jason Gingold, director of Randolph Technical Career Center.
These alternatives include: Vermont Academy of Science and Technology at Vermont Technical College in Randolph, a program that enables seniors in high school to earn both high school and college credit, and work-based learning programs based at traditional high schools.
Gingold said technical center students who have been trained to use a meat slicer or to work on a roof can get more out of an internship compared to untrained students from a traditional high school.
“I think the high school thinks they can do an internship just as well as we can …. I don’t think we should be in competition,” he said.
But, Stearns said the work-based learning opportunities high schools offer differ from internships technical center students might pursue.
“Those students who are out doing that aren’t looking for that full-career experience,” Stearns said.
Fluctuations in the number of students opting to attend a technical center do not affect the number of courses South Royalton School is able to offer, Stearns said.
It does, however, affect the number of students in each class, he said.
“Just by staying doesn’t free up resources to offer more classes,” Stearns said. “It’s not like our entire junior/senior class is leaving.”
About 25 percent of South Royalton’s juniors and seniors attend a technical center, he said.
As an administrator at a sending high school, Stearns said he appreciates the value of technical centers despite the competition for students.
“I’ll make those difficult decisions,” Stearns said. “If all of them chose to go there — if it’s appropriate — that’s where they go.”
Similarly, at Rivendell Academy in Orford, where the budgeted amount for technical education went up $53,000 (more than 30 percent) to $211,000 out of a total budget of $10.5 million for next year, Superintendent Mike Harris said he supports technical center programs.
“It’s not a big amount of money, even if we send a good deal more kids,” Harris said in a phone interview. “It’s more than offset by the commitment to say, ‘Yeah this is something we want to encourage.’ ”
Adapting to Change
In Hartford, where the technical center had an enrollment of 323 in 2016, down from 380 in 2006, according to data provided by the Vermont Agency of Education, director Doug Heavisides said he doesn’t feel a sense of competition with sending schools, but he’s aware that it exists elsewhere in the state.
“This is not really just a good tech center,” Heavisides said. “It’s a good school.”
One thing technical centers do to keep students’ interest is to close programs with low enrollment and open new ones in their place, Heavisides said. These decisions are made with input from an advisory committee of industry professionals, he said.
For example, this year Hartford closed its engineering and architectural design program and opened a STEM program. Next year, the center will change the focus of its computer technology program to cybersecurity and computer science.
“You can be the best teacher in the world (but) if you don’t recruit enough students for your program, your program closes,” he said.
School leaders in Claremont aim to improve the technical center’s offerings in the future, School Board Chairman Brian Rapp said in a phone interview last week.
“We’ve had too many cuts and we need to go back in the other direction,” he said. “We’re trying to get our center to be more conducive to learning for more modern times.”
One area for possible future expansion is a teacher preparation program, he said.
“That’s something that’s going to be needed in the future,” he said.
While adding programs, the center also needs to make people more aware of its offerings, Rapp said.
“We’ve got to do a better job of getting out there and selling our programs,” he said.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
