One-stop shops

NEA Today, Nov 1999

Students at a vo-tech high school in Massachusetts learn skills for the future while serving the community.

Rare is the place where you can get your car fixed, do your banking, purchase flowers and enjoy a gourmet lunchall in one stop. But residents in and about Haverhill, Massachusetts, are doing just that at Whittier Regional Vocational Technical High School-and students are making it possible.

Operating since 1973, the school offers students reality-based technical training in 19 fields ranging from marketing to metal fabrication.

"These operations provide students with the skills they'll need to be gainfully employed, and they service the community as well,' says Thomas Ward, the cooperative education director at Whittier.

Marketing students, for example, learn banking with help from a bank manager. Computer science students design sets for plays and Web pages for local businesses. And cosmetology students give facials and perms.

"What's unique about our school is that everything is hands-on," Ward says. "What students do is not hypothetical. They can touch it, look at it, use it, and take pride in their successes."

These successes have garnered Whittier significant media and celebrity attention.

Last year, Mary Ann Esposito, host of the PBS cooking show "Ciao Italia!" and author of five cookbooks, visited the Poet's Inn, the school restaurant that serves over 200 patrons a day. She was impressed with student culinary skills, says Anthony Vallario, It., a chef who teaches culinary arts.

Poet's Inn diners enjoy an elegant atmosphere, and selections include chicken scallopini and cannelloni, as well as trendy desserts like tiramisu.

Vallario, a former chef at Ritz Carltons in Boston and Montreal, says students in his "shop" learn more than how to cook and bake high cuisine. They leave the Whittier experience able to computerize orders and manage a dining room. In fact, one of his students recently won a $16,000 scholarship to a culinary arts school.

Whittier students are also acclaimed locally for continually giving back to their community. When the town's little league team needed a dugout, for example, students built one.

Whittier kids have also repaired trucks for a local fire station and remodeled a police station, saving thir community more than $200,000. For other schools, they've rewired classrooms for the Internet, saving each school $25,000.

Another success at Whittier is the school's cooperative education program. This efforts matches interested juniors, in their last semester, and seniors with employers. All the students are prescreened for technical and academic knowledge. They work every other week in paid positions and attend school during the off weeks.

"The employer essentially takes the place of the shop instructor," Ward says, providing further training and grading students on attitude and ability, and on whether they work hard, follow directions, and show up on time.

The program, notes Ward, is so successful that many former co-op students now have their own businesses and are able to hire students currently attending Whittier.

Whittier also offers a Tech Prep program, where students can earn up to a semester of college credit.

According to Karen Sarkisian, Whittier's superintendent and director, the vo-tech population has changed over the years, drawing many more nontraditional vocational students, including young women and students from private schools.

"People used to think that vo-tech schools were for noncollege-bound students, but 60 percent of our students are pursuing college," Sarkisian says.

When our kids leave Whittier, they're either working, going to college, or doing both," she adds. "We've prepared them to become a viable part of their community, and you can't ask for anything more than that."

For more information: contact Thomas Ward at 978/373-4104, extension 266.