By Angela Hatton
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkms/local-wkms-925589.mp3
Murray, KY – It isn't uncommon for those who don't know Kentuckians to ask whether we wear shoes, a stereotype that points at the state being rural, poor, and uneducated. As with most stereotypes, this image contains a grain of truth. Before reforms that began in the early nineties, Kentucky ranked near the bottom in the amount of money spent per child on K - 12 education. The Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 increased oversight and focus on ensuring more students graduated from high school. As the economy in western Kentucky evolves, a high school diploma alone won't guarantee a job. As Angela Hatton reports, business and industrial development means another transition for Kentucky's education system.
The only thing that matches the sunlight streaming into Eleanor Spry's office is her bright passion for education. Spry is the Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction at Murray Independent School System. She's been in the field for 32 years. That kind of one track career path is common for her generation, but Spry says research from the Department of Labor Statistics shows upcoming high school graduates may change careers four to ten times in their lifetimes.
"Students must be multi-faceted when they graduate from high school in order to step into their post-secondary training, whatever that may be. There's going to have to be that next step, where before that was never the issue or that never was fully into play."
Spry says the Murray School System begins talking about careers as early as elementary school. In middle and high school, they get more serious. Curriculum focuses on strong science and math instruction, and students are encouraged to take Advanced Placement classes for dual credit. Murray even has a career discovery center. Even so, Spry says they could do more.
"Oh, if we could have so much more career counseling funded and provided. Not only during the school time, but during other opportunities."
Morgan Lyons is a Murray transplant. He graduated from Burman County High School in 2006. Lyons calls himself a middle of the road student, good at what interests him. He thought about going to college, but wanted to focus on film-making, and the typical university courses he looked at didn't impress him.
"Figured probably the best thing for me to do rather than waste a bunch of money on general ed kind of classes in college, figured I should hold off until I find a good, more reckon I could get a degree in film."
Lyons has been working since graduation.
"It's pretty much just been restaurant jobs. A buddy of mine got one for me right out of high school, and once you get one it's pretty easy to get another one and another one. When I moved down to Murray, I tried everything except a restaurant job, and no one would hire me. And the first restaurant I applied for hired me, which was Tumbleweed."
Lyons says his decision isn't typical of his classmates. He says all of his friends went to college right after high school, or at least attempted it. According to the 2000 U-S Census, nearly 41 percent of Kentuckians 25 and over had completed at least some college classes. Sheila Clark of the West Kentucky Workforce Development Board says more adults in the region are coming to them for retraining.
"By far the largest numbers of individuals that we serve are those people that have a job and they have lost that job through no fault of their own, by that company closing, by that company downsizing."
Clark says Kentucky's labor market saw a major change in the late eighties when Toyota brought one of their plants to the state. Even though the company set up shop in Georgetown, the Purchase and Pennyrile counties felt the effect as more industries began to evaluate the strength of their workforce, including their education.
"And not only did they look at the educational background of that person. They looked at the functioning educational level of that person. Some of these people had high school diplomas, but they weren't functioning at a twelfth grade level. Or even a 10 - 12 grade level."
Clark says workers began to realize that a well-prepared mind trumped a strong back.
"And our adult education facilities were just overrun. They were at maximum capacity."
Also in the late eighties, while adults were going back to school, the Kentucky Department of Education was working on improving the K - 12 system. KDE Spokesperson Lisa Gross.
"Education was a focus in Kentucky, but not like it is now. The focus then was very negative, because any national measure that you looked at, we weren't doing so well. We had high drop-out rates, we had low academic performance on our state tests, we had funding issues."
Per pupil spending in Kentucky hovered between 48th and 49th worst in the nation. Gross says KERA, or the Kentucky Education Reform Act changed the way schools were funded. It also instituted greater accountability and oversight.
"You can quantify everything that goes on in a school every day, and if you go to school now a lot of times you'll see teachers walking around with flash drives, or they've got some kind of recording device that they're entering information into. That's the kind of thing you wouldn't have seen 20 or 30 years ago. Y'know, teachers took attendance."
Gross says tracking the data helps school administrators target specific student needs.
"You can't just run a group of students through high school like cattle; they don't all go through the same shoot. They don't start out the same way, they're not going to end up the same way, they're not going to want to do the same things."
While the focus in Kentucky has changed toward better preparing students, gaps still exist. Morgan Lyons feels his high school in Burman County focused on keeping a steady average, rather than pushing students to achieve. He says they did talk about career preparedness and the students took career projection tests, but he says the emphasis wasn't strong enough.
"Lesson guide for that particular week was to take the test. We'd work on this topic to kind of help guide us toward that direction, but then we just kind of forgot about it after a while."
A disconcerting number of Kentucky students drop out of high school. Gross says the number is approaching ten to twelve percent in some counties. First Lady Jane Beshear and Education Commissioner Terry Holliday are spearheading a series of summits to raise awareness about these issues. At a Drop-Out Prevention Summit in Murray earlier this year, Holliday voiced his hopes for Kentucky education.
"If we could just double the number of Bachelor's degrees by 2020, which is one of our state's goals, we could raise the household income by 17,000 in this region."
There's no doubt a higher post-grad degree puts a person in line for better pay. But the Workforce Development Board's Sheila Clark says at least some education after high school is essential to the jobs of tomorrow. She says the Purchase and Pennyrile development districts are in the middle of two comprehensive studies.
"Looking at where will the sector growth be? What will happen in the next ten years and what should we be training individuals for?"
As an example, Clark points to the chemical industry, which is outpacing the traditional manufacturing sector.
"When you go to work in a chemical industry, you're looking at a minimum of a two year degree in chemical engineering. And you're looking at higher level degrees, four and six year degrees for the other jobs."
Murray Independent School's Eleanor Spry says the education field likes to toss around the term "life-long learners."
"And I think it's been one of those phrases where it makes you feel good when you read books or go to conferences and seminars or you try to stay on the cutting edge on things. It is no longer an opportunity for someone who like to dabble with that. It is an imperative."
The message is clear. Kentucky students must be flexible in their future careers, or risk getting left behind in a developing world.