What I really love about our school is we’re the center of the community. We can walk to the town square.”
Superintendent Fred Morecraft is standing in the lobby of Carmichaels High School, where brightly wrapped school-color walls complete the school spirit atmosphere of this open space where students come to do lunch or study or just hang out. The Mighty Mike mascot has morphed into a new school brand – an electrifying blue letter jacket capital C with a gold and white lightning bolt shooting through it.
GreeneScene is celebrating students and alumni this issue so I’ve come to interview a high energy, positive role model of a teacher, principal, now superintendent to talk about individual leadership. But Morecraft will be the first to remind me in no uncertain terms, that leadership is a team effort, every inch of the way.
Morecraft beams as he points to the new branding on the wall that spells out the steps to scholastic success: “Resiliency…Our Compass. Experiences…Our Pathway. Careers…Our Destination.”
No need to jot down the details – they’re all right here in the folder he hands me, written by him and his administrative team to describe all the career paths the district has to offer. And why.
Things have certainly changed since Morecraft was hired in 2006. “I grew up in Bobtown. My dad and granddad were coal miners. I remember when I graduated my dad wrote on a card ‘Find a career where you come home with clean hands. I started here teaching sixth grade and I found I loved teaching.”
Back then, the economy just beginning to shift into high tech gear and rural schools with shrinking tax bases were struggling to catch up even as the labor market demanded more skilled workers. With the current state school tax system, it takes ingenuity, trust and teamwork to do it, Morecraft said. “We trust our teachers to try new things for our kids. Education is different now. We’re preparing them for jobs that might not exist yet. We have to think outside the box and so do they.”
The information in the folder notes that 57 percent of district students go on to post-secondary institutions. What about the other 43 percent?
Match that with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting more than 6.3 million job openings, a number greater than the present labor pool and the question is: “What can we do to help our students be successful? We want our students to be able to be placed in jobs soon after graduation if they choose the career route. Studies have shown that we are near crisis mode as a country as far as students entering trades.”
With career pathways as the goal, “Students will gain the experience in high school with the courses they elect to take, along with internships and apprenticeships to match passion with experience.”
Resiliency is the key, Morecraft stresses. Kids from underemployed America have to be resilient to face real life challenges both at home and in school, to be ready to find a career that is up to the minute with the technology they will be working with in the future.
As educators, “we’re here to give them experiences that will be the pathway to success – which is our goal. They need to draw connections between what they are learning and real life.”
This new era of high tech learning was – silver lining here – speeded up by the pandemic of 2020 and expertly driven home to every Greene County school district by Morecraft and his team of fellow superintendents from Mapletown, Jefferson, Waynesburg, West Greene and the CTC.
When students were sent home on Friday, March 13, 2020, the school districts and their superintendents, support staff and teachers hit the ground running. They spent the next months adding to existing technology projects and upgrading classrooms with Covid funding to create more maker spaces for all the new skills to be learned when the students returned.
Meeting the future where it lives is an ongoing process that all Greene County superintendents work on at their monthly group meetings, Morecraft said.
“This year the superintendents decided to meet at different schools and show each other what we’re doing. We compete athletically but academically we want to give all our students great resources so we’re trying to share those resources. Starting next year Carmichaels is offering 3-D modeling through Epic Gaming at Carmichaels and our kids are going to make and recreate historic places like our town square and we’re looking into moon mapping. Kids will write the programs and do the graphics. Jefferson will be doing it too.”
News Reporting and Integrated Communications taught by Jessica Hathaway is an elective that introduces ninth through twelfth graders to different forms of media – print, broadcast, blogging and podcasting. Students can choose, learn and move on to another medium and learn some more. Juniors and seniors have the option to do advanced news reporting on Mikes Nation Live, filming football games, live streaming morning announcements and anything else that needs the media in school, including school board meetings, Halloween parades and fashion shows “so parents could watch at home,” Hathaway tells me. Mikes Messenger, the school paper is both online and in print form.
The futuristic world of Artificial Intelligence, Digital Fabrication, VR Imaging and Drone Technology is part of the Technology Pathway STEM rotation for seventh through ninth graders lead by Nichole Morecraft. High school students are then ready to work with the latest technology to explore robotics and AI into the future and learn to design and manufacture in-house what consumers want and make a profit for their lab, from custom printed t-shirts to 3D printing and laser cut wraps on mugs. Doing this kind of design and production work is the core lesson learned with hands-on STEM curriculum. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. Add Art and you have STEAM.)
Lavin Media Center, a total makeover of the old school library concept, has added the equipment that today’s students use to learn – including walking or pedaling on exercise machines while reading books or using laptops or tablets. In a side room, the school Envirothon team was working on an ecology presentation that might win them a state championship – again. Their environmental theme is creating a riparian zone to mitigate and adapt for the changing climate, using Brook Trout, the keystone species that is greatly affected by warming streams.
(By the time you read this they will have already competed. You can see how they placed at envirothonpa.org)
If you want to see what the future holds in store for the kids coming in to this magic kingdom of future learning possibilities, stop by the Carmichaels School District Facebook page and scroll down to the first graders taking a tour of the high school side of campus.
Those pictures are worth more than a thousand words!