Meeting notes: November 16, 2011

There was general agreement that the charge was a comprehensive one – covering any and all of the pressure points along the education continuum that could contribute to improving the training and education of the Maine workforce.

Review of the Websites in the Charge

  1. Maine Children’s Advisory Council. Group was established in 2007 as a means of focusing on and coordinating early childhood education. The website is a survey of several initiatives around this subject.
    • Maine Families – provides home visits to new parents; has received an additional federal grant to expand.
    • Significant focus on reducing Child Abuse and Neglect. Links to Child and Abuse Neglect Councils, Preventing Shaken Baby Syndrome, etc.
    • Hope/Percy Study referenced in the Maine Public Policy Review that highlighted how significant early childhood education affected levels of employment, health, etc. later in life.
  1. Maine Employers Initiative (MDF). Helps and encourages employers to provide incentives to employees to complete secondary education. Much of it is public recognition and support.
  1. Maine DOL
    • Have data showing that unemployment rate is only 3% for college grads; 9% for high school grads; 15% for no hs degree
    • Unemployment rate for skilled employment (doctor, lawyer, teacher) is considerably lower than the unemployment rate for non-skilled employment (construction, etc.)
    • Age group with the highest unemployment is 20-24. Lowest is 35-40. This pattern has held true over the past decade.
  1. Prepare Maine
    • Group started from the premise that people all around the state working on education are not working together.
    • Their goal was to get a Commissioner to think strategically about this problem – to make him a conductor of all these folks.
    • They proposed a series of action steps. DOE (and DOL) has embraced this and has set forth a specific schedule of jobs that will exist in the economy and how students can be trained to fulfill those positions.

The group has become inactive to some extent because the Commissioner has taken this on as a top priority.

  1. College for ME. Vision to increase
    • Transition initiative – Preparing adults (financially, logistically, remedial education) to go back to college because so many are not
    • Series of action steps to help low-moderate income students to move towards post secondary education.
    • Highlighting the importance of college generally

Discussion of LD 1422 – An Act to Prepare Maine People for the Future Economy

SH – We could provide comment and criticism about the LD. Are these goals realistic? Are the time frames realistic? When there is a mention of ‘all’ kids, does that include special ed children?

DN – Affordability, Awareness, Alignment, Availability

JC – Commissioner has already issued the first part of a strategic plan consistent with a number of initiatives, along with the Commissioners of HHS, DOL. A lot of the Affordability, Awareness, Alignment, Availability issues are being addressed in the strategic plans. One of the things missing is figuring out what is it that inspires children. A couple in Bremen is asking adults in the town to talk about what it is they love to do. This is being posted on YouTube. A challenge could be how to funnel this kind of enthusiasm to in school to present this information to children. Peter Benson wrote a book called ‘Spark’ that speaks to this.

ST – Should add ‘Aptitude’ to the list (as with the Iraqi example) because we need to explore what it is that children want to be. There needs to be a feedback system from parents and kids back to the school.

JB – We keep coming back to the inspirational piece – how do we have an impact on the 200,000 to motivate them as to what they want to be. Who speaks to the kids to find that out?

SH – Part of the problem with the LD 1422 is that the primary and secondary benchmarks are all test scores.

JC –Three things that will change the landscape

    • Within 6 months, Maine will have requested a waiver of NCLB requirements. 10 states have already received such waivers.
    • There is a desire to increase respect for teaching as a profession, with teachers as coaches and directors and individual learning plans.
    • More outcome based performances (‘Spark’). No longer the exact same tests for everyone.

How is the State going to measure if kids are ready for Kindergarden? Maine is not going to be doing this via a typical test. Will be with Common Core standards – this is a progressive outcomes based assessment (not just multiple choice, but also based upon essays and individual interviews).

ST – Health care is moving towards outcomes and patient satisfaction. Education should be improved in the same way. DOE needs to respond to metrics. (JC noted that there is something in the DOE’s strategic plan that does this).

DT –Bar Harbor (African American) girl adopted by white family who asked NAACP if someone could speak about racial sensitivity. After DT and the group he assembled made their presentation, the kids led the discussion. How do you engage the kids? How to include the parents in that discussion.

JT – Challenge is the parents who may not otherwise be good role models.

Inspiration is the tool; alignment is the goal

JB – remembering when the LM group asked the Director of the Job Core questions about how they network, and the graduates began to cut her off.

BI – We can’t lose sight of the existing adults who need to get some type of additional post secondary education to fulfill the available jobs.

Project summary

Title – Maine Sparks for Success; Inspiring students and adults to pursue the Careers that Maine is going to need in the future

Audience – Adults who have not completed high school, current Jr. and High School students, policy makers, MDF leadership

Goals – Find inspiring people in the selected fields who will talk about their career experience

Outcomes

  • Short Term – Create a web page; collecting and posting videos of people in low supply jobs in Maine
  • Long Term – Encouraging more Maine students and adults to pursue careers in jobs areas for which there is not a sufficient projected workforce.

Deliverables – Document that sets out the reason why Spark is important and why it is important now; Video of people talking about what they do and why they love doing it; Links

Document Outline

Awareness, Alignment, Accessibility, Affordability, Availability, Aptitude

Identify Careers

Find the top 5 job areas from the DOL website (or other resource) where the number of jobs coming online vastly exceeds the number of Maine residents that are able to fill those jobs. Occupational Health, Dental Technicians, Paralegal,

Identify Sparkers

Find candidates from those 5 job areas at one of three different stages of the career: Beginning – Middle – Late. Make a video of these individuals as a means of beginning a discussion

Interview Qs

  • What do you do?
  • How did you get into this type of work?
  • What did you have to do to get here?
  • What do you love about your job?
  • Why do you do what you do?
  • What inspires you about your work?

Connecting with the Audience

Need to make sure that the video produced has maximum impact on the students and adults who are watching it

Action Plan

What – Who – When

  • List of jobs – Jay – Dec
  • Craft document – All (Newell, Steph) – Full 1st draft
  • Find sparkers – All – Dec 15
  • Create website – Jay – Nov.
  • Guide to making video – Donald – Dec.
  • Make video – Jan
  • Evaluate effectiveness of video
  • Report to LM peers – All – April

Next Meeting

Will be either Wednesday December 7, Tuesday, December 13 or Wednesday December 21

Next Meeting facilitator will be Dan

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