Dr. Shonda Windham - Planning Futures for Students

We sat down to talk with Dr. Shonda Windham, and she is an amazing educator. She talks every day with high school students that are trying to decide what are they going to do with their lives after high school.

She helps them make those decisions about college or going into the workforce. She knows how to talk to students about those critical decisions. She talks with their parents, and she knows how to talk with those teachers to help them help those students make those critical decisions.

The Regional Maritime Training System, RMTS, was established using a $11 million (41%) Good Jobs Challenge Grant awarded by the Economic Development Administration and is supported by $12.1 million (46%) provided through BlueForge Alliance in partnership with the U.S. Department of the Navy, and $3.5 million (13%) in funding by other sources. The Regional Maritime Training System, led by the Hampton Roads Workforce Council is an equal opportunity employer/program. Auxiliary aids and services are available upon request to individuals with disabilities. VA Relay 711.

Visit www.maritimejobsva.com to discover what career and training opportunities are right for you in the Hampton Roads maritime industry. 

The Regional Maritime Training System (RMTS) was established using a $11 million (41%) Good Jobs Challenge Grant awarded by the Economic Development Administration. It is supported by $12.1 million (46%) provided through BlueForge Alliance in partnership with the U.S. Department of the Navy, $850,000 (3%) from the U.S. Department of Labor/ETA – Community Project Funding, and $3.5 million (10%) from non-federal sources.

Transcript

We sat down to talk with Dr. Shonda Windham, and she is an amazing educator. She talks every day with high school students that are trying to decide what are they going to do with their lives after high school.
She helps them make those decisions about college or going into the workforce. She knows how to talk to students about those critical decisions. She talks with their parents, and she knows how to talk with those teachers to help them help those students make those critical decisions.
We are talking today with Dr. Shonda Windham from Chesapeake Public Schools and we're at the Chesapeake Career Center. And if you can see the background, you can see this looks a lot like some of the places that we have visited before.
It's an industrial environment. This is where you're teaching students from Chesapeake Public Schools. But you have a perspective that makes this conversation so worthwhile for it. not true.
We've heard concerns about what do we say to students that don't feel like they're ready for college. What do you say to their parents? What do you say to the teachers that for the 40 years since I went to college been banging the drum saying the path to success is through college?
And that wasn't always the reality, But now we're faced at a time and with an opportunity for people to go into the skilled trades. But so many things have to be done differently.
And you're at that intersection of where those things start to happen differently. So I'd really like to hear your perspective on any of those topics. Absolutely.
Well, I think it starts with the name of my department, which is college and career readiness. So not career readiness, not college readiness, but college and career readiness.
So with that, we've had to really employ practices that will make parents rethink what a good education looks like,
what success looks like for our students. So it is important for us to make sure that our students have a plan post -high school, whether that plan is to enlist in the military,
employ with one of our local employers, or enroll in post -secondary training. I would say some of the conversations we've been having in trying to bring awareness.
The whole reason we're doing this podcast is to help people who aren't familiar with what a vocational career looks like is none of those things preclude the other.
Absolutely. You can start out in skilled trades and go to a certificate program that leads to or jumps directly to a degree program through.
to their parents? Well, to start with the student, our goal is to, first of all, engage them, to make sure that they see all the options that are available.
So most often, and I'll say 10, 20 years ago, we pushed college into our students, onto our students. That was the route that we wanted them to take.
And so we had to start by rethinking how we were doing that. Not just focus on college alone, focus on all the other options that are available to them.
And so that comes with exposure into these businesses. We increased our partnerships with the local businesses in the area. They come in, they talk to our students and our parents.
They invite us over for tours and field trips for our students. We have definitely beefed up our us to reach our parents because they see their students engaged in these activities,
enjoying these activities, and we get the buy -in from them. Each year we have an event to highlight our students here at the Career Center called Signing Day.
And the first year we had this event, I guess it's probably been about six years ago, it brought me to tears to see the excitement and the pride from the parents for their students.
So let me tell you a little bit about signing day. This actual event mimics the athletic signing day, where students who are planning to go to college sign their contract to play that sport.
At this event, our students signed their contract to go directly into employment with employers in our community and parents are excited about that because that means their their child is getting ready to go make 40 -50 thousand dollars a year sometimes more than that and they're excited to see their child going into that next phase of life so the joy that events like that provide for students and parents definitely helps
us to send a different message. So that must be really exciting for somebody graduating high school to know that they're going to go into a $40 ,000 or $50 ,000 job right away.
Absolutely. Parents aren't paying for college. They're not in debt. It gives them the opportunity to get a head start on their peers that might be, that might, that would have chosen a different path.
For sure. Do the parents understand enough? Is industry helping you explain what a career? but is industry helping tell the rest of the story well enough so parents understand this isn't just a great start but what a career looks like over 20 30 40 years i'll say yes and no to that i think the industry partners that have truly partnered with us in this work definitely helped to get the message out but i think there's
so many other businesses that haven't come on board. So we are constantly looking for ways to expand our partnerships so that students get those experiences in a variety of fields and not just as you described in the welding field or in pharmacy tech,
which is another program that we have here. We have a mechatronics program and an electricity program. But making sure that we have experiences for students regardless of what their career path is.
So in some cases, we may have five welding employers who are great partners. They're here, they're present, they're helping us to get the students' jobs and exposure to the field,
and then we might not have a single industry partner for, and I'll say, auto body as just an example, although we definitely have great auto body partners.
but sometimes we just don't have the full representation that each career field a world.
So we may have a health and medical science world. We may have a manufacturing world. We may have an education world. But in each world, the students get exposure to those careers and they get to really engage in hands -on experiences.
It has proven to be a wonderful, wonderful event, one that our eighth grade students and their parents are very excited about each year and the support that we've gotten from the community for this it just blows my mind it's amazing we partnered with Hampton Roads Workforce Council the city of Chesapeake as well as Dollar Bank to make this happen for Chesapeake public school students so it's amazing so they start out
that's our first first exposure at eighth grade? No, actually it's not. So in our middle schools we have career focused programs like technology education,
computer science. We have family and consumer science, which is what we used to call back in the day home at class where they actually get to cook and sew and do things of that nature.
In the tech ed class we have the exposure to those hands -on construction fields. And then of course, gets exposure or has the option to get that exposure to those career fields.
So we call it career and technical education, CTE. And we have CTE programs, as I just described in middle school all the way up through high school.
And then we have our specialized centers like the Career Center, which is where we are today. We have our STEM Academy. We have the Science and Medicine Academy. We have the Governor's School.
We have our IB Academy. parents had exposure to a skilled trade and therefore they didn't have a preference for going that direction.
Although that helps, you know, when the parent is pushing them, you know, in a path that they actually took. Are you able to overcome that resistance with an influencer on a student that had a,
had a dream for their kid, for what they were going to do, but the kid comes back and says, no, I want to go a different direction. That's, that, that, that puts, But that comes with the exposure and making sure that when we have events,
we're inviting parents in. We're having conversations with parents, sometimes one -on -one. We have parents communicating with the teachers and teachers communicating with the parents.
And sometimes we have to have those hard conversations and really lay it all out and say, listen, this career path provides these options for your child. Your child can make X amount of money doing this and enjoy it,
that your child will get up and do something that they enjoy every single day, versus them going off to college and paying thousands of dollars for tuition and then going right back to the career field that we've tried to steer them away from.
So sometimes we have to let the students follow the path that is most important to them. What can industry do to help make that conversation go better? Continue to partner with us.
I think that is the number one way. So when we solicit those partnerships, when we're looking for opportunities for work -based learning, when we need guest speakers to come in,
when we need businesses to host tours and field trips. Continue to partner with us in that way because that helps us to get the word out. Highlight our students on social media in any type of publications that they have or that they provide to the community.
Showing that they are invested in our students helps us to really get more students involved and more parents to buy in. Maybe some podcasts.
I love it, I think a podcast. Thank you. so closely related and necessary,
cyber in this industry really does matter because of the government work. It does. And that's where I think we don't tell that story well enough of how tightly woven the region in all of these industries are and how closely related to shipbuilding and ship repair it really is.
Do you track your students after graduation? How many are employed right away? How many stay in the field how So the post,
the first year post high school, we reach out to students and parents and try to find out, did the student go into the path that they told us they were going into? Did they go to college?
How are they doing? So we have data that we provide the state for that. But in high school, their senior year, we also try to capture what their plan is. So I would say maybe in about April or May of each year,
we provide a survey to students to find out what their potential path will be. And ironically, and I love to share this because most often you would think that it's the opposite.
But here at the Career Center, we found in the past when we started to give these surveys that just as many of our students were planning to go into college as into the workforce.
And in a building like this, you tend to think they're all going into the workforce, but that is not the case. And so we shifted our recruitment and our practices to engage those students who are planning to go into college first.
We still capture them or try to capture them because our goal is to have those students come back to us. So go away to your four -year college or university. not any opportunities here you know I wonder if that's something that we the industry could do better about explaining what those opportunities are absolutely I agree I think we can and I think that starts with engaging with students while they're in high school as
long as we can let them know of all the options that are available before they go off to school then they know they can come back hey there are jobs in Chesapeake in Hampton Roads that align with my career field.
You know, I can come back home and do this. I don't have to go to Richmond or to Charlotte, North Carolina. I can come right back into Hampton Roads and do this. So getting the businesses into the schools,
engaging the students while they're in high school is definitely where it starts. A hundred percent of your students that leave this program employed not a hundred percent because we have again just as many going into college as we do into the career field but what I will say is that a hundred percent of our students that desire employment immediately after high school are employed and so I'll give you an example of
that we started out with the signing day event, I think we may have had 20 students that we recognize at that event. Now we're recognizing over 80 students at the event each year that increases more and more.
So we have again over 80 students who are going directly into a career field. But that doesn't necessarily include those who may go to college first and then come back.
So they're not always captured in that number. How about summer internships or other? Absolutely.
I'll tell you a program that we recently started is called Grow Our Own, and it is a Chesapeake Public Schools program designed for our students to work in the various departments within Chesapeake Public Schools.
Students and parents sometimes seem to think that all we do in education is teach, but as you know, There's so many other jobs within Chesapeake Public Schools.
We have an IT department, we have a transportation department, we have a school nutrition department. And so what we do each summer is we'll hire students to work within certain departments in Chesapeake Public Schools,
shadowing our employees, and they actually get paid. So along with 40 hours of on -the -job training they also take a class with several modules that actually teach them those soft skills that are necessary for the workplace how to dress when you go to work arrive the importance of arriving on time the importance of communicating and not necessarily by sending a three -letter text you know but real formal communication How
to create a resume. So they learn this in the class, but then they also get the hands -on experience within our district. And this is also a program that each year continue,
the number continues to grow, and we get more and more students involved. And they find out we do more in Chesapeake than just teach. That's fantastic. What a great story in getting people on the path,
things that we took it, that we might have assumed, but so many other things have changed. Absolutely. The way I started out pursuing my first job is not the way people get jobs now.
You are absolutely right. And knowing those, there are different soft skills that are required. Yeah. Yeah. Shonda, can you walk us through a day in a student's life when they're in the program.
How do they spend their day? So students who sign up to participate in a program at the Career Center. They spend half of their day here at the Career Center and the other half of their day at their home high school.
So we accept students here at the Career Center from all seven Chesapeake High Schools. We bust those students from all seven Chesapeake High Schools and they either come for two hours in the morning or two hours in the afternoon.
So they come in their junior year, and then they follow up with their senior year. We do have one program, Nail Tech, in which we accept 10th grade students as well.
But within the programs, we have some one -year programs where they're here with us for just one full year. And then we have programs like welding,
where they are here for two full years. So depending upon the program, that determines whether they would stay with us for one year. Your program here is where I have said,
we need a governor's school for the maritime arts and sciences. I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. This sort of four -year program to expose people to an industry,
to teach them the wide -ranging things, right? All the things we talked about, HVAC, welding, cyber, so many others, logistics,
all these things that this industry, this region. focused on on all of those things could be so powerful I love that and you said it I mean this is the area that we live in there's so much maritime related for our students post high school I think that would be ideal in the new facility that we hope to open we have designed what what will be a Maritime Academy.
So we'll have several other academies, but we'll have an academy focused strictly on Maritime. We'll have one strictly focused on health and medical science. We'll have one strictly focused on trades and entrepreneurship.
So we've kind of thought through, you know, what that should look like in the future, but absolutely being able to get our focus a little bit more centered around what we know is in our region would help us all.
It would help our entire community. You have been at the nexus of this for the several years that I've known you that we've been talking about these things.
I've never not been impressed with you, with the program, with the students that I've seen working here, you have something magical and special here, but it doesn't come at a thin air.
There's an awful lot of hard work that has gone into this and continues to succeed every day. It is so impressive. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much for the invitation.
My pleasure.