WSC receives CTE grant monies
Posted: Mar 30 2010
Williston State College has announced the receipt of grant money to help prepare students for nontraditional careers. According to David Richter of WSC, the grant monies will be used for promotion of various career fields to non-traditional students.
"It's called Preparing Students for Nontraditional Fields," he said. "It's a gender-based grant which will be used for promotion and planning activities. For instance, the nursing and massage therapy field, which are very heavily female dominated, we'll use the grant to promote and expose males to those programs. And programs that are traditionally heavy male, such as automotive, building trades, things of that nature, we'll expose the females to those."
He stated that the areas WSC has chosen to work on are Information Technology (IT), which will target females; nursing, which will target males; agriculture and automotive, both of which will target females. The funds received from the grant will purchase materials to accomplish the end goal of showing high school students the choices they have in fields of study they maybe hadn't considered because of their gender.
Traveling materials will be purchased that can be taken to the schools for presentations and workshops and Richter said that they will get non-traditional individuals from the areas targeted to go out to area high school and promote the program to non-traditional students. "For example, a male nurse would go out and promote the nursing program to males."
The program has already been implemented to promote the IT field.
"IT is traditionally a heavily male-dominated field, and right now WSC Computer Systems Specialist Ken Quamme is taking some of his female students out to the schools and they're doing IT workshops, targeting women with promotions, covering things that will grab their attention."
The agriculture presentations will allow students "to do stuff with vaccination administration, soil texturing, as well as simple things like making flour and butter, things of that nature," Richter explained. "The automotive field will use some of the techniques used with Rosie the Riveter; in nursing they'll use health science procedures such as measuring blood saturations, using an AED, etc. Most everything they take with them to the schools will be hands-on activities and are related to the technical aspects of the career field they're focusing on."
The more than $7600 received by WSC for this project was provided by the Carl Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006, with 20% (or about $2000) provided by non-governmental sources.