Perry Central...Meeting the Demands of Our Regional Economy

By: Phil Zellers

Over the past several months I have had the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the job market and regional economy in Perry County.  It has been interesting looking into the numbers of our regional economy and putting together what that means for our students.  It started with a Perry County Development Corporation meeting I was able to attend last fall and has continued through the work of our Work Ethic Certification.

At the PCDC meeting, the Purdue Center for Regional Development gave some information about our regional economy, which includes our surrounding counties.  Here are some of the numbers that came from that meeting.  In Perry County, there are 814 establishments (businesses).  Of those 814 businesses, 703 are Stage 1, meaning they have 2-9 employees.  100 of those businesses are Stage 2, meaning they have 10-99 employees.  There are 11 Stage 3 businesses that have 100-499 employees.  The Stage 3 businesses make up 37.4% of our county's total sales, Stage 2 at 35.5%, and Stage 1 at 27.1%.  

Our biggest industry in the region is manufacturing, accounting for about 23% of our total jobs.  Within manufacturing, some of our largest professions include transportation, fabricated metal production, machinery, and computers and electronics.  Our other major industries include forest and wood products, and agriculture.  Some of our emerging industries are business and financial services, arts and entertainment, and IT and telecommunications.  Other staples of our regional economy include defense and security, biomedical and biotech, and energy production.

So, what does all of this mean?  It reaffirms what we already knew.  Our students are going to be facing a changing and more skilled job market and that Perry County has a real need for skilled workers.  I think it is important as educators to understand our regional economy and job market so we can better prepare our students to face the world after high school.  Almost all of the regional industries listed above require more than a high school diploma.  Technical knowledge, certifications, and degrees are becoming more and more important for our students to be able to compete in the regional job market.  Our regional economy desperately needs employees with these skills.

Perry County has a relatively low unemployment rate.  The problem is that local employers sometimes have a difficult time finding these skilled workers.  Good jobs are going unfilled or filled by people outside our region.  To maintain the businesses we already have and to attract new businesses, we have to help ensure our students can help meet these demands.  We have to work together with our local businesses to make sure we know what they are looking for in employees.

I am proud to be a part of Perry Central because I feel like we are leading the way in preparing our students to meet these needs.  We have a number of Career and Technical Education (CTE) pathways and courses for students to pursue, including engineering, manufacturing, computer science, agriculture, and biomedical fields.  Along with these pathways, we offer several dual credit courses as well as 6 different industry certifications.

Perry Central has cutting edge technology to teach students electrical circuits, hydraulic and pneumatic systems, simple machines, CNC routing, computer programming, robotics, 3D printing and more.  We have a large number of students participating in internships and getting real world work experiences through them.  We are also in the first year of offering a Work Ethic Certification for juniors and seniors.  This certification allows students to demonstrate that they are dependable, take initiative, are involved, and possess other skills employers have said they need in their employees.  This week our school will be hosting and hearing the expertise of Dr. Stone, Director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education.

Perry Central is adapting and taking the steps to make sure our students are as prepared as they can be, as they move forward after high school.  They are learning how the knowledge and skills they learn in the classroom are applied to real world situations and the workplace.  As a lifetime resident of Perry County and a father of three little Commodores, I am glad we are taking these essential steps.  I am proud to be a Commodore!

Surpassed by a Student…Good for You!

By Jamie Guillaume

Back in October, I began an adventure with my students that has not only helped me develop as a teacher, but has opened my mind to new avenues of learning.  Although I read and had many discussions with colleagues about letting students lead their own learning and study their own passions, it was not until I dove in without looking back, that I really began to understand the impact of this type of learning.  As a teacher, I naturally thought it was my job to know everything and to lead students through their passions. 

Although being the keeper of all of the information may have been what being a teacher was at one time, that time has now passed us.  During the process of implementing Genius Hour, we have had many struggles but lots of success!  Most struggles have primarily been students trying to figure out what interests them.  At first they tended to be passionate about their friend’s interest.  However once we established a safe, open and honest classroom culture, students began to flourish!

One student is now able to say and write a greeting with her name and age in Japanese.  I have another student that has digitally created music through computer programming.  Someone is writing a novel. There is a student that has mastered creating websites and even a student studying and creating origami.  This is just some of the fascinating learning that is taking place; keep in mind these students are only 5^th graders!

So you may wonder how we got here and more importantly, how did we find the time?  Time is of course the million dollar question!  I decided that I was going to let one intervention class period a week be devoted to Genius Hour.  I know this seems like a lot of time to give and so many times I was tempted to take it away because I had so much to cover!   However this time is precious to my students and me. As students began to have the time to develop their interests, it spilled over into the curriculum and helped them develop more than they would have otherwise.    

For example, the student that studied website design, made an outstanding website about the American Revolution when we were studying that topic.  The information she researched and displayed far surpassed the standard and my knowledge base!  The student who created music, has learned how to incorporate it as background music for projects.  This leads me to the most important lesson I have learned, it is okay for your students to surpass your knowledge base on a topic and if they do, congratulations, you will love the feeling! 

Google's Loon Balloons

By Nick Etienne

You climb 170 steps up a series of dusty wooden ladders to reach the top of Hangar Two at Moffett Federal Airfield near Mountain View, California. The vast, dimly lit shed was built in 1942 to house airships during a war that saw the U.S. grow into a technological superpower. A perch high in the rafters is the best way to appreciate the strangeness of something in the works at Google—a part of the latest incarnation of American technical dominance. On the floor far below are Google employees who look tiny as they tend to a pair of balloons, 15 meters across that resemble giant white pumpkins. Google has launched hundreds of these balloons into the sky, lofted by helium. 

At this moment, a couple of dozen float over the Southern Hemisphere at an altitude of around 20 kilometers, in the rarely visited stratosphere—nearly twice the height of commercial airplanes. Each balloon supports a boxy gondola stuffed with solar-powered electronics. They make a radio link to a telecommunications network on the ground and beam down high-speed cellular Internet coverage to smartphones and other devices. 

It’s known as Project Loon, a name chosen for its association with both flight and insanity. Google says these balloons can deliver widespread economic and social benefits by bringing Internet access to the 60 percent of the world’s people who don’t have it. Many of those 4.3 billion people live in rural places where telecommunications companies haven’t found it worthwhile to build cell towers or other infrastructure. After working for three years and flying balloons for more than three million kilometers, Google says Loon balloons are almost ready to step in. It is odd for a large public company to build out infrastructure aimed at helping the world’s poorest people. But in addition to Google’s professed desires to help the world, the economics of ad-­supported Web businesses give the company other reasons to think big. It’s hard to find new customers in Internet markets such as the United States. Getting billions more people online would provide a valuable new supply of eyeballs and personal data for ad targeting. That’s one reason Project Loon will have competition: in 2014 Facebook bought a company that makes solar-powered drones so it can start its own airborne Internet project. Google’s planet-scale social-engineering project is much further along. In tests with major cellular carriers, the balloons have provided high-speed connections to people in isolated parts of Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. Mike Cassidy, Project Loon’s leader, says the technology is now sufficiently cheap and reliable for Google to start planning how to roll it out. By the end of 2015, he wants to have enough balloons in the air to test nearly continuous service in several parts of the Southern Hemisphere. Commercial deployment would follow: Google expects cellular providers to rent access to the balloons to expand their networks. Then the number of people in the world who still lack Internet access should start to shrink, fast.