Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Students can now use CTE courses for core credits

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At the May 9 Cascade School Board meeting, Cascade Superintendent, Bill Motsenbocker, talked about an opportunity for the district to offer equivalency credit for CTE (career and technical education) courses. 

That means someone could take a class for say computer technology and also get that included as a math credit. But there are some state requirements that must be met before school districts can offer this. 

“It requires us to establish a district CTE team which includes the principal, CTE Director, a teacher of core subjects, a CTE teacher, school counselor, and representative from the curriculum department, which makes me laugh because we don’t have a curriculum department. That most likely would be a representative of our Teaching and Learning Council,” Motsenbocker said. 

A student taking AP Computer Science could earn a math credit, as long as that student is either enrolled in Algebra 2 or has already completed Algebra 2 or above. 

“They can actually go in and use that as a math credit or just a CTE credit, which is something relatively new,” Motsenbocker said. “This is a brand new policy. It’s something we would like to move forward with, so in the future if we decided to do that, we can.”

There are different types of courses, said CTE Director Kirk Sunitsch. 

“There is a local equivalency which can be approved by the board. Then, there is state equivalencies where the state issues a framework, which has all the standards,” Sunitsch said. “Not only state standards in English, math and science, but also industry standards. There’s two sets of standards, along with a leadership component like DECA.”

With the local one, for say fourth year English, Sunitsch said you could substitute Business English or Technical Writing. That has been locally approved. 

“There’s actually 35 state of Washington approved student frameworks. If you teach those, those get a state equivalency in algebra or geometry, third year math, science lab,” Sunitsch said. “One thing a former state superintendent said, basically, moving forward with this, core equivalencies give core academic knowledge along with real world application. I think that is really where it fits a lot of kids to get the hands-on learning.”

Sunitsch said they plan on moving this forward. Courses like engineering could be used for math or science credit. He said this came out in 2013, but they just came out with the equivalencies in 2015. 

This new initiative also requires the district to begin the CTE program with career exploration, which is already being done, Motsenbocker said. Those CTE classes are supposed to support academics, life skills, leadership for high wage employment. 

“They also establish a Career and Technology advisory committee to advise the district. These are people we would bring in from industry. We would bring people in from agriculture, the trades, computer technology,” Motsenbocker said. “We would create an advisory group. Their purpose is to advise the district on the labor market and the needs of the labor market so we can keep up with that. This type of thing changes every six months. There is something new coming down the pike.”

It also requires the board to establish procedures so that all CTE course are conforming to the district CTE plan, which Sunitsch is developing. 

“It also requires the district to maintain good records when using state and federal funding sources for those CTE programs. Much of this stuff we already do, we just need to get it updated in our policy,” Motsenbocker said. 

Board President Carrie Sorensen said this policy looks new. Motsenbocker said it is an old policy they are updating. 

“This gives an example of how to develop a district plan. Job shadow that we do with CTE now. We do a lot with some of our dental practices and Cascade Medical. It also gives the dual credit options, which we already talked about,” Motsenbocker said. 

Ian Dunn can be reached at 548-5286 or editor@leavenworthecho.com. 

 

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