JOBS effort eyes education

N.C. Sen. A.B. Swindell has been appointed vice chairman of a new commission designed to give high school students more marketable job skills.

The Joining Our Businesses and Schools, or JOBS, Commission is a three-year project designed to find out what skills North Carolina businesses are looking for and create programs that teach them to students in early colleges, said Swindell, D-Nash.

The commission will bring together legislators, educators and business leaders in a series of meetings being held in the state’s seven economic development regions by May. The first meeting will be Nov. 18 in Williamston.

“A lot of our plants out here ... are getting students who go to work for them that aren’t ready for the world of work. It is no longer just students being able to do math and read and write. They’ve got to be able to specialize to meet the occupations of the area where they are,” said Swindell, who was appointed Sept. 28.

The commission is the next extension of a the 2003 Innovative Education Act, which helped establish early colleges throughout the state, said Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton, who chairs the panel. Now North Carolina has a third of the nation’s early colleges, five-year programs that allow students to take high school and community college classes concurrently and graduate with an associate’s or technical degree.

Commission members will send notices to government, education and industry leaders in each of the seven areas before the meetings, Dalton said. Meetings will focus on the leaders’ visions for their area’s future, what skills are most in demand and how the schools can meet that need.

“Our charge would be to recommend to the state board at least one early college program in each region that can be created to fuel those students that are ready for the jobs of the future that exist in that region,” Dalton said.

Depending on the region, the programs could focus on fields as diverse as aeronautics, engineering, tourism or linguistics, Dalton said. He hopes to have three or four programs implemented by fall 2010 and the rest in place by the following year.

Several programs of this kind have already been started by local schools and businesses statewide, but there is more potential there, Swindell said.

“We have some apprenticeship programs, we have businesses that participate in foundations at our community college campuses and obviously there are people who are CEOs and presidents of businesses whose children go to public schools. But we really have not done a good job of networking occupations and what business needs,” Swindell said.

The bill for the commission originally was sponsored by N.C. Sen. Vernon Malone, D-Wake. When he died April 18, Swindell agreed to sponsor the bill.