As published in Manufacturing & Construction News - June 1, 2017
The Toledo Technology Academy (TTA) is the smallest high school in the Toledo Public Schools system, but the students there are doing big things.
The integrated middle school and high school currently has about 327 students in grades 7 through 12, featuring a math, science, and technology-heavy curriculum that culminates in an internship at a local company. Director Gary Thompson describes his school as a true collaboration between businesses and the school system, featuring an active governing board of local business leaders.
“From the beginning, this school was put together with the notion of being very focused on the fundamentals of mechanical and electrical engineering – part of the curriculum all the way through school,” said Thompson. “One of the things that our business partnership has enabled us to do is to provide internships – students that work directly with the businesses and in the businesses. Every senior here, at minimum, will do a 30-day internship. We look at, by the time they’re seniors, what these students are good at, what they want to do after graduation, and then a business partner with an actual project that they need to have done and we align them with that. They don’t just job-shadow and waste people’s time, they are all out doing, in some cases, what they think they want to major in in college. Many times, when the student enters this, they’ll find out ‘No, this isn’t really what I want to do,’ so they don’t waste time in college. On the other end of it, for our business partners, they can’t just go and waste time. They have to actually be performing something the business partner wanted done.
“Now our students don’t get paid for this, they get graded,” he continued. “We started this in 2005, and it took a lot of time to convince businesses that a high school student could do something for them. And I get that. I retired from General Motors after 34 years and came here, so I get the business partners’ end of it. What has resulted is that I don’t have enough seniors to fill the requests from my various business partners. And that’s really a good position to be in.”
According to Thompson, he is always working on expanding his business partnerships, and sees a tremendous opportunity not just for students, but for the infrastructure and economy of northwest Ohio.
“We’re trying to expand what we’re doing, and lead across technical career education,” he said. “The fact of the matter is too many people have been sold the idea that the only way to success is through college. Now, I personally have nothing against higher education, we do believe that it’s a very good thing, and I have multiple degrees and certifications. But there are many other ways to be successful in life, and in our area there is a need for people that want to get into technician jobs, apprenticeships, that sort of thing. Exposing students to those opportunities is not a bad thing at all either.
“A percentage of our students, I would say possibly somewhere around 40% of our seniors, go directly into a four-year college program,” he added. “Many of them choose an engineering pathway. When those students graduate from here, they are prepared to do I think virtually anything. A lot of our students finish our curriculum and do very well; I can think of three of my valedictorians over the last five years, two of them are involved in nursing. I had one in the College of Business looking at becoming a manager. So the kids can do that, and that’s really good, we focus on college and making sure the students go there. I like to tell parents that the teachers here do the heavy lifting, and if your students work with them, your student will graduate prepared for a four-year or two-year college, if they so choose, or a technician job, or an apprenticeship, or possibly good employment in a field they enjoy so they don’t live in your basement until they’re 45.”
According to Thompson, the curriculum for all grades sets out a continuous pathway all the way up, including two hours a day of technology courses for seventh and eighth graders that is appropriate for their age level.
“The robots that are mostly used around here by GM and Chrysler tend to be FANUC and KUKA universal robots, and my instructors can certify students in those areas,” said Thompson. “The seventh graders start out in the LEGO robotics and programming it. So the students come here, they go to school an hour longer a day, it’s a math and science and technology-heavy curriculum, but they get all of their core courses and they graduate with everything they need to go to any college in the nation if they so choose, or with certifications from various industries, if they choose to go that route. It’s a rigorous curriculum for kids.
“You don’t have any choice in what you take here,” he continued. “For six years the curriculum is mandated. There are a few electives, but not many. They all go to school for an hour longer a day. All of the kids will take a minimum of four years of everything. Science, they take five years because they take two different sciences their sophomore year. We don’t do sports. We don’t do a lot of art, and we don’t do music. The kids that come here have a particular interest.”
Every one of the seniors at Toledo Technology Academy spends the entire month of May interning at various companies around Toledo, until they graduate May 26th. All academic requirements have been met by spring break, after which they begin their internship.
“What we ask is that they have a meaningful task, that someone is monitoring what they’re doing, and there’s an output, because they have to log what they’re doing every day,” said Thompson. “We ask the employees to tell us, first of all, are they showing up on time every day, are they not wasting time, are they solving problems for you, taking direction, communicating well, the first entry-level things employers want. The hours they tell us, ‘We need a student,’ are the hours the student shows up.
“I have some young men that their dads are tool and die makers,” he added. “They decided that’s what they wanted to do, so they’re out on an internship doing that. The end result is I have students that have chosen to come here and take a very focused approach to education that’s very heavy on the fundamentals of mechanical and electrical engineering. Well, that also gives those people a large amount of knowledge that they could easily, if they choose to, become skilled tradesmen. In fact, we are working, and we will have a procedure in place, where the United Auto Workers will recognize one of our students.
“One student will have completed about two years of her apprenticeship by going to high school here, and that’s without changing anything we do. It’s just another good option and pathway for students. At the moment I have kids at Hale Chrome, kids at General Motors, kids at Jones & Henry, and at Toledo Molding & Dye. All over the place, depending on what the student’s interest in the business partner may be. It seems to have been working pretty well since 2005 from the business partners’ perspective; we ask, first of all, ‘What do you as a business want, what is your need, and how can we fulfill it?’”
TTA started in 1997, and was originally a program at Libbey High School. According to Thompson, it was a vocational technology teacher who spoke to Oscar Bunch, then president of UAW Local 14; Tom Volk, owner of Ohio Belting; and US Representative Marcy Kaptur about the idea of opening a technology academy. Kaptur helped the school get a grant from the National Science Foundation, and the school system came together collaboratively.
“I came to the school in 2004,” said Thompson. “In 2005 I personally visited businesses, talked to people, and convinced them to at least just give our internship program a try. Since then, this is a requirement.
“What comes right to my mind is back then Johnny Maser was the head of engineering for GM, and I had known him from retiring at GM, and he was pretty adamant that he didn’t want high school kids there,” he continued. “I talked him into it and I think he did it as a favor the first year, the next year he called me and said ‘Can I have three of those kids this year?’ That has morphed over the years, every senior must do a minimum 30-day internship. What we are getting now is businesses saying ‘Can we have someone doing this project from October to the end of this year and graduation?’ And then you have career technical education, where they must do a senior capstone project, and many of our students do a capstone project that’s actually used out in business. So it’s grown mainly because the students come here and we don’t do what a lot of other schools do.”
Mike Deye, president of Hale Performance Coatings, Inc., has been taking interns for the last four years, and has one this year who he says is outstanding.
“I think there’s a large deficit in people to hire for industrial positions in town – it’s a general complaint by most employers,” said Deye. “To have a school who’s preparing students for CNC or any type of manufacturing skills is a very large deal for us.”
According to Deye, this internship program has been his first exposure to TTA, but based on the quality of students he has seen he plans to continue to support the program for years to come.
“We always want to try and find a skilled workforce, I think that’s the challenge of this next decade,” he said. “The one we have now is moving around to all areas in our shop, and we’re trying to give him a full experience of what we can offer here at Hale. We’re trying to get him under the wings of some seasoned operators here. What I’m equally impressed with is our operators and their willingness to work with the students.”
Alan Smudz, senior manufacturing project engineer at General Motors (GM) Toledo Transmission Operations, is supervising two Toledo Tech Academy students this year.
“Part of Toledo Powertrain’s engineering team business goals is to support the local community in meaningful ways,” said Smudz. “The TTA collaboration is a natural fit because we have a highly technical and professional engineering team with an abundance of challenging and meaningful projects. TTA students dive in to these challenges, and develop meaningful skills well ahead of their peers. We hope this reinforces their excitement for technology.
According to Smudz, he has had from one to eight interns for the last six years, all of whom have exceeded expectations, and many who continue to work with the company while attending the University of Toledo (UT).
“The caliber of the TTA students has been outstanding,” he continued. “We often offer them part-time jobs on the weekends and full-time in the summers. At the end of four years, we have a good working relationship that we hope turns into a life-long career at GM.”
Tom Volk, owner and president of Ohio Belting and governing board member of TTA, said that he has been involved with the program since its beginning and has hosted one or two interns each year for the past 15.
“I’ve been involved with TTA since before it was formed; I’m one of the businesspeople that’s been with it since it began in the 80s as a pre-program at Libbey High School,” he said. “I helped it become its own high school however many years ago, and I’ve been on the advisory board since it was formed and helped hire the people. I’ve been involved since the beginning and saw the benefit of it, and before the internship program we’d just go help them out on specific projects, which a lot of companies still do. When the idea of an internship program came up, we were probably one of the first companies to do it.
Ohio Belting has no interns this year but Volk currently employs two workers who started as interns from TTA.
“The main characteristics of TTA students is they understand that they have to show up on time, and they understand responsibility because they’ve been involved in group projects,” he said. “They’ve been exposed to various technologies of machines and stuff, and that’s important, but what’s really important is that they understand responsibility. Also, they talk to adults, they’re not shy, they speak up, they communicate well because they’re been trained to communicate verbally and in writing, so they do those things well, they do them generally better than some of the college kids I’ve had in here.
“We try to find out what their interest is, whether it’s the technical aspect of the products, or whether it’s the transaction nature of the business,” he added. “We’re a distributor, we’re not a manufacturer, so it’s transaction based: people buy stuff from us and we buy from manufacturers. Typically, we’ll have them learn how to process orders, we have them talk to some suppliers, we have them get some pricing, we teach them some videos we have internally on products and have them go through that, and we do a fair amount of web-based business so we get them involved with that if they’re more interested in the marketing aspects. They just do a little time with everybody in the company in the shipping, order process, accounting if they’re interested, and computer stuff. I don’t have a specific program for everyone who comes in here, it depends what we’re doing at the moment.”
Thompson said that at least two of his graduating seniors have already been offered jobs paying around $20 an hour after they graduate.
“I have six kids that are employed at GM who were chosen right out of high school,” he said. “One of them, I hear he’s working a lot, but he’s earning $60,000 a year right out of high school, with full medical and vision. That’s not a bad outcome. The outcomes vary depending on the student, and our goal is to expose them so they understand there are really a lot of good choices out there.