Carol Johnson, Southern Indiana Business Report
BEDFORD – US Sen. Mike Braun, R-Indiana, stopped in Lawrence County Friday and met with educators and workforce leaders working to improve job opportunities in Lawrence County.
Braun received updates on an education collaboration that is helping rural schools thrive, a program that is helping adults gain their high school equivalency and a successful work-based learning program for high school students.
About 30 people attended the session held at the North Lawrence Career Center.
Apryl Kidd, director of COSMOS (Collaboration of Shoals, Mitchell and Orleans Schools), and Mitchell Community Schools Superintendent Brent Comer said COSMOS offers a total of 16 career pathways among the three schools.
By sharing faculty, Comer said the three rural schools are able to offer far more pathways than they could do alone.
“COSMOS is an evolution in education for our kids and our community. We can’t find anywhere else in Indiana and the United States that is doing what we do,” he said.
Rural schools face challenges when it comes to funding and attracting teachers, Comer said. And rural communities that are losing population, in particular their youth, can fall into survival mode.
“COSMOS is about thriving and creating solutions to our own problems,” he said.
In addition to career pathways, COSMOS has provided educator training, STEM programming and created digital fabrication labs.
Kidd said COSMOS, which engages students in all grades, doesn’t compete with other career-focused programs in the county, such as the North Lawrence Career Center, now in its 50th year.
Amy Redman, director of the career center, said work-based learning is giving students the chance to use skills they learned at the career center in a workplace setting. To expand its WBL opportunities, the career center partnered with Regional Opportunity Initiatives and its UpSkill Work & Learn program.
The number of career center students who have completed 75 or more hours of WBL has nearly doubled since the 2019-20 school year. Currently 40 students are in the WBL program, compared to 22 in 2019-20. The career center has also seen the number of students either employed or enrolled in a post-graduate program six months after graduating increase from 68% in 2020 to 77% for the Class of 2022. She said she anticipates the number to be even higher for the Class of 2023.
Bedford North Lawrence High School senior Reid Parker shared his experience with WBL. He works 8 hours a week in a WBL program working as a draftsman at Texacon. Parker, who plans to study mechanical engineering at the University of Louisville, has taken classes at the career center all four years of high school and said he’s learned things he likely wouldn’t have learned if he had taken classes only at the high school.
Joe Timbrook, director of Lawrence County’s Workforce Coalition, gave an overview of the coalition’s efforts since it formed in 2017. An Introduction to Local Jobs and Skills has now had 12 cohorts of participants, over half of them justice-involved. A total of 112 men and women have graduated from the program which offers training in welding, construction, CNC and CDL. The participants have spanned from age 17 to 76.
Of the most recent cohort, every graduate is currently employed. Of those who are justice-involved, the recidivism rate is 7%. The workforce coalition also helps adults get their high school equivalency.
Braun was impressed with what’s happening in education to better meet the needs of Indiana employers and skill up adults who don’t plan to enroll in college or post-secondary education.
“Sixty-five percent of jobs need a better high school education,” he said.
Earlier in the day Braun visited the Lehigh Cement plant in Mitchell. In 2022, Lehigh completed a $600 million modernization.