St. John Rotary Club members were encouraged to get involved in the new School-To-Work program that's being developed to prepare Virgin Islands youngters for productive lives in the workplace.
The idea of the School-To-Work program is to introduce pupils to the concept of preparing to earn a living from the time they're in kindergarten, and reinforcing it through high school. The program will encourage children to explore career planning instead of simply applying for and accepting a job, territorial program director Rebecca Dedmond said.
Instilling and strengthening a work ethic in today's students will take a combination of teacher training, parental involvement and partnership with businesses, she told the Rotarians.
Dedmond posed two questions that she said business people must help to answer: "How do we bridge the gap with the skills kids need to learn? And how do we get teachers to teach kids what they need to know about your job so they know what to do when they get to work?"
One reason the School-To-Work team decided to speak before the Rotarians, Dedmond said, was because of the St. John group's own budding summer job initiative for young people.
Bill Wood, a career information specialist from the Labor Department, invited the Rotary as a club to go further by getting involved in a pilot program being developed at the Julius E. Sprauve School.
After the meeting, Wood said Sprauve principal Shirley Joseph wants to help older students whose poor academic records make them eligible for release from the school system at the age of 16. "The kids are 16 years old, sitting in a class in the 8th grade," he said. "She wants to keep them in Julius Sprauve School for a year for a program she wants to develop, herself."
Wood said the objective would be to send such students out into the local community to take part in work-study training at businesses for half of their school day, while they would spend the other half of the day in a formal classroom setting.
He said 14 students are currently being considered for the program. In order for it to succeed, he said, there must be enough local business sponsorship to provide work-study opportunities for them all.
Joseph wouldn't comment on the work-study idea Friday but said Rosalia Payne, Education Department superintendent for the St. Thomas-St. John District, has given her consent for the Sprauve School to pursue the development of a transition program for students considered to be at risk of dropping out of school.
