Although many educators insist that career education is a K–12 curriculum, introducing students to the world of work is often still a high school thing. At Cottrell Middle School in Oregon, however, we believe that work experience is an important part of mid-level education and a natural complement to intellectual and social development. Through a formal program that offers in-school jobs to all students who want or need them, we enable middle schoolers to experience many of the conditions of work in the outside world and give them opportunities to apply abstract knowledge to practical problems.
The Cottrell Job Program
Begun five years ago as a way for special needs students to learn everyday living skills and improve their self-esteem, our program has grown to accommodate more than half of our 74 middle school students and added career preparation for students of all abilities to our school's mission. In the beginning, we created a handful of cafeteria jobs and paid our workers minimum wage. At that time, our workers were developmentally disabled young people who needed the physical and occupational activities these jobs provided and at-risk students who needed something to keep them out of trouble during the noon hour. All needed some prestige in the eyes of their peers that having a paying job might bring.
We soon found that work and pay were more attractive than we had thought when other kids started asking if they could have jobs, too. With our limited funds, hiring more workers was impossible, but we hated to let slip an opportunity that so motivated the students. So, while we held off the eager applicants, a committee of teachers, other school employees, and parents was formed to wrestle with the problem. The members came up with a plan that expanded job opportunities and replaced wages with affordable, yet desirable, rewards. The committee's plan included a system of tokens that were redeemable for field trips and gifts; a daily schedule that allowed students to work without missing classes; a set of procedures for keeping work records and for hiring and firing; and a network of adult supervisors to oversee student workers.
We estimated that, with a corps of 25 workers, we could run the program on $1,200 a year. Since then, we have further increased the number and types of jobs available, expanded the range of rewards, and established an operational framework that allows further expansion, if needed. Still, our costs remain low, not exceeding $1,500, while providing jobs for more than 40 kids.
Help Wanted!
Cottrell Middle School's job program provides a wide range of job choices to its students. Below are several of this year's jobs and their descriptions.
Physical education assistant: Supervises small group activities of younger children while teacher works with another group.
Science aide: Sets up and takes down equipment; cleans glassware.
Playground assistant: Plans, teaches, and leads games for younger children during the noon recess.
Groundskeeper: Using gloves and a bag, picks up papers and other litter on school grounds; visually checks for any safety hazards.
Lunchroom orderly: Fills ketchup and mustard bottles; washes off tables after lunch; keeps napkin and flatware containers filled.
Recycler: Flattens and packages empty cans and cardboard cartons; assists in sorting paper collected from classrooms; transports clean kitchen refuse to school garden.
Clerical aide: Sorts and files papers; organizes classroom materials; prepares bulletin boards.
Custodial assistant: Helps with cleaning windows, doors, and walls; empties waste cans; helps with minor repairs.
Gym manager: Sets up and puts away gym equipment; sweeps the gym floor.
Student Store manager: Decides on store stock; helps in purchasing; plans advertising; schedules and supervises clerks.
Substitute: Fills in any job when a regular worker is absent.
A Real World of Work
In changing our mission to career education for all students, we decided to provide the a full range of jobs that required different levels of skill, responsibility, and initiative. Although we allowed any student to apply for any job, teachers encouraged students to apply for ones that best suited their abilities. And our first priority was still getting special needs and at-risk kids into jobs, even if we had to create ones especially for them. The application and interview process highlighted each applicant's qualifications and helped us to ensure student success and the prudent placement of workers. This expansion of the original concept brought a number of benefits: it removed any stigma from having a job; made us an equal opportunity employer; and turned us honest, in that we no longer had to hide our motives for hiring certain kids for some jobs.
As the program now exists, we hire 6th, 7th, and 8th graders to perform jobs identified by school staff members, who write job descriptions that are posted in September and January. Students fill out applications, provide references, and go through interviews. We repeat the process mid-year, so that students get a chance to try a different kind of job and so those who might have felt too overwhelmed by academic work to try earlier get a second chance. During the course of their employment, students must fill out daily time sheets and undergo periodic evaluations by their adult supervisors. We expect all workers to be prompt, reliable, polite, and industrious; those who fall short in any area are warned and may be fired.
Students work for 20-minute spans during the school day, but not during academic periods. They may work before or after school or during a study hall, their recreation period, or their own lunch period. Students who work at lunch time eat earlier during their recreation period.
The program is managed by a teacher, who is allotted one teaching period per day for this responsibility, and the on-site supervisors who advertised the jobs. The committee formed at the beginning of the program oversees its operation. When staff members are not available to supervise a particular job, parent volunteers may fill in. Supervision does not always mean being with the student, however; several workers, such as groundskeepers and office messengers, work alone.
Something for Everyone
Students earn wages in the form of tokens that can be spent for parties, field trips, items in the school store, and gifts at an end of the year auction. The committee organizes field trips and other job rewards. We have at least one out-of-school event each semester—such as a skating or bowling party—that students may pay for with their tokens. But the big event of the year is the June auction, where kids can bid on desirable gifts.
Most of the students seem content to save their tokens for the auction, rather than spend them early on lesser rewards. Last year, a few students had accumulated several hundred tokens by working two jobs and were able to bid successfully on valuable items, such as a boombox or small TV. Some students, who had earned as few as 30 tokens, were still able to bid on packages of candy, stamps, puzzles, or costume jewelry. For the auction, we put aside most of our biases about what is good for pre-adolescents and try to offer items students really want. In fact, the program manager polls kids each year to find out which items are most appealing at that time and provides a broad array of items at different levels of value, so there is something for everyone.
What We've Learned
In evaluating our program we have used written reports and interviews from workers and supervisors to determine job-satisfaction, skills learning, and attitudes. We have also looked at the behavior records of at-risk students. The trouble with this kind of evaluation is that we don't have a control group or much in the way of baseline data. What is clear, however, is the improvement in the school climate. Students and adults see themselves as collaborators in the business of running a school, and they are doing it well. The only problems that mar our sense of success are that a few kids who would benefit from having a job don't apply (even under strong persuasion) and that some at-risk kids don't carry through on their commitments and resign or are fired. Our best employees are the responsible students with good grades who would succeed even without a school job.
Although our jobs program is inexpensive compared to academics or sports, paying for it is an ongoing concern in these hard financial times. It is difficult to advocate publicly for extracurricular jobs with recreational rewards when academic programs are being reduced or eliminated. In order to avoid the inevitable yearly scramble for general fund resources, we have applied for some small grants with mixed success. Twice we received support from private foundations, but our program proved ineligible for state or federal support.
In the second year of operation, I naively submitted a Chapter 2 grant proposal, which was approved—initially. But nine months later, with the money already spent, state officials told us that we could not use federal funds for non-educational rewards or field trips. After arguing fruitlessly that, whatever the rewards, the goals, activities, and results of the program were indeed educational, we gave up on Chapter 2 and replaced the money from our general fund. It still seems ironic to me that a program that meets the Chapter 2 guidelines in all other ways and reaches the kinds of goals Chapter 2 advocates, should be disqualified because we buy students Game Boys rather than dictionaries.
Not Just Jobs
In the past two years the focus of our program has changed slightly but significantly. Now, in the light of the national and state shift to assessment through performance, we view the program not only as career education, but also as a natural arena for students to demonstrate academic learning. Thus, we are putting a greater emphasis on the math, writing, reading, and problem-solving aspects of jobs. We ask students to write evaluations, advertise, estimate costs, figure supply needs, and do parts of the thinking, planning, and reporting required by their jobs that were previously done by the adults in charge.
We want to give students the opportunity to practice the skills they are learning in classrooms and to see that such skills have valuable applications. As far as possible, we want to create not just jobs but a real world of work within the walls of school, providing high-level experiences that will lay the groundwork for professional and technical careers, family and civic responsibilities, and community involvement.
