ASHLAND — Ashland County-West Holmes Career Center Superintendent Mike Parry says he hopes a strategic plan for the school’s future development could be ready by the end of calendar 2018.
Carla Messer, a management consultant working with Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, said the process will analyze demographics, such as enrollment and graduation rates, and information from various customer groups to determine what the school and staff do well and what some of the potential challenges will be.
“You know what the priorities are going to be but I’m going to lay out the framework for what’s doable given all kinds of things like budget constraints, resources, people and time and what’s going to have the biggest impact on the outcomes that are decided,” she said.
Messer said officials will use focus groups, other person-to-person contact and a variety of social media to gather information, including why students and parents made their decisions about the Career Center. She said officials will have to do a great deal of interacting with constituents because the school has a large geographic area with an oftentimes diverse population of students, parents and businesses.
“Distance also is going to be an issue because there is some identity that gets us associated with the various schools and communities so we want to make sure we are honoring that identity,” Messer explained. “At the same, time we’re going to have to rise up and say what we have in common to be able to tackle the things that matter most to outcomes.”
Ashland City School District representative Rick Ewing pointed out that some of the Career Center’s main customers are the employers who are looking for the workforce that school’s training programs will fill.
“We have to know what they need so we can bridge that gap between needs and needs and connect those,” he said.
Parry told the board that he asked several groups for presentations on how they would conduct the strategic planning process and that the proposal from Cincinnati State and Messer looked like the best. Messer previously has done strategic planning for vocational programs in the Cincinnati area including the Warren County Career Center and Butler Tech in Hamilton, Ohio, where Parry was an administrator before coming to the Career Center.
During the business portion of the meeting, the Career Center Board continued action to expand course offerings by approving three new satellite programs and related teaching positions that will start with the 2018-2019 school year at associate schools, as well as a testing coordinator position at the school.
The new offerings include a computer science program with one part-time teaching position at Loudonville-Perrysville Junior and Senior High; a manufacturing program with one full-time teaching position at the Ashland County Community Academy; and a College Now business program with one part-time instructor at Ashland University.
During associate school reports, Tri-County Educational Service Center representative Forest Chanay discussed the difficulties school districts face in trying to improve security in the wake of the recent high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. He said he believes metal detectors at entrances may not be a workable solution because school hallways are required to be wide.
“You just can’t block half the entrance to that so if you go that way, you would have to build a separate structure on top of the quoted $5,000 cost of the machine,” Chanay said. “Also, there’s no uniform program for the training that’s needed for a person who is going to man that station.”
Chanay also said that overlapping jurisdictions cause problems with dispatching 9-1-1 emergency calls in Ashland, Wayne and Holmes counties.
Fellow Tri-County representative Jim Bargar pointed out that state or federal funding for security equipment and training is still “way up in the air.”
