Rising up:
The light bulb: Career and Technical Education in PPS, with classroom views at Pittsburgh Brashear and Pittsburgh Carrick high schools

2021 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

Angela Mike was a typical student, bored with school and not seeing how her daily classes at Allderdice High School would help her in later life. She didn’t feel inspired or find many of her courses interesting.

One day she saw some older students leaving school with manikins and hair kits. She asked where they were going, and learned they were heading to Westinghouse High School for the Cosmetology program. When she looked into it, she discovered she could become a licensed cosmetologist and start earning money before she graduated from high school. Mike, the youngest of seven children, couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

She enrolled in the course. “It changed my whole perspective on learning,” says Mike, now executive director of Career and Technical Education (CTE) for the Pittsburgh Public Schools. She began to love coming to school. Her grades rose. And she earned her cosmetology license before graduation. These days, she attends CTE recruitment events for those “light bulb” moments when students hear something that sparks their interest, they look up, and “you connect with them eye-to-eye.” It “keeps my joy going,” she says.

About 500 students each year are enrolled in one of the district’s 16 CTE programs, located at all four 9-12 schools, Pittsburgh Westinghouse Academy 6-12, and Pittsburgh Milliones 6-12. Some students travel across the city for a program that’s not available in their region.

Health Careers Technology is by far the most popular, with more than 100 students enrolled last year in programs at Westinghouse and Pittsburgh Carrick and Pittsburgh Perry high schools. Also popular are Automotive Technology and Automotive Body Repair at Pittsburgh Brashear High School. Because of a partnership with the Greater Pittsburgh Automobile Dealers Association, Mike says, “There are jobs waiting on every single one of those students.” Multimedia Production and Coding at Brashear also performs well: “All the students earn industry certifications.”

She sees growing interest in Carpentry, offered as a pre-apprenticeship program at Carrick and Westinghouse. Students continue to be attracted to long-established programs like Cosmetology, at Perry and Westinghouse, and Culinary Arts, at Westinghouse and Carrick. Entertainment Technology, a newer program offered at Milliones, is thriving due to an “excellent partnership” with the University of Pittsburgh, she says, which brings students to a state-of-the-art studio several times a month.

Early Childhood Education, also introduced more recently at Milliones, hasn’t had many takers yet despite offering a pre-apprenticeship model in collaboration with Carlow University. Machine Operations at Brashear has also been a “hard sell” for students, though the field has lucrative jobs available, she says.

Rounding out the list are Business Administration, Sports, and Entertainment and Emergency Response Technology at Westinghouse; Finance Technology and Information Technology at Carrick; and Engineering Technology and Refrigeration, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning at Pittsburgh Allderdice High School.

CTE in the 21st century

CTE is not your parents’ vocational-technical school. In the past, vo-tech programs were criticized for “warehousing” students thought not to be “college material,” who tended to be students of color and economically disadvantaged. While in Pittsburgh the percentage of CTE students who are economically disadvantaged is slightly higher than the district average for grades 9-12, CTE students’ race/ethnicity closely matches district demographics for those grades. In terms of academic rigor, Mike says that the technological aspect of many jobs demands a high level of academic skills. For example, students must be able to read technical manuals written for adult readers. By preparing students for post-secondary education and the workplace, Mike says CTE offers “the best of both worlds.”

Some aspects of CTE are monitored by the state and federal governments. Pennsylvania requires CTE programs to prepare students for high priority occupations, jobs that will last and pay a family-sustaining wage. To make decisions about which programs to offer, Mike and her team review labor market industry data, data from Partner4Work, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development’s “Inflection Point” reports, and information from the state. They also look at student surveys to determine their interests. Especially at a time when workers are sorely needed, she says, “We don’t want anybody to go down a dead-end road.”

In the CTE classroom, the scheduling of instructional time and the teaching approach reflect best practices for supporting students and keeping them engaged. Teachers have students for a daily three-period block; therefore, they get to know one another well. Students learn academic content in contexts that have meaning for them: the ratios involved in mixing hair dye, the measurement of medication, the physics behind repairing a car frame. They work at their own pace to master skills on a detailed “Competency Task List”—a standard that has relevance outside of the classroom. Depending on the program, they take college-level classes from Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) instructors, giving them a post-secondary head start. Three CTE counselors from the CTE division help students maintain electronic portfolios that they build over the years, and help them complete a required career plan.

So how do teachers provide students with “the best of both worlds”? CTE teachers Tom Lipovsky at Brashear and Celina Reese at Carrick share their approaches to a job both say they love.

The Auto Body Shop at Brashear

Tom Lipovsky had owned an auto body shop for years when he got what he thought was a prank call with the offer of a job in the Automotive Body Repair program at Brashear. He ignored it at first, but the caller was persistent. “I interviewed for the job after the fact,” he says.

Lipovsky feels the program is one of the most successful in the district, based on how many of his students pass the state’s NOCTI (National Occupational Competency Testing Institute) tests, which assess job skills, and go straight into the industry without needing further training. He tries to track his students’ careers, which isn’t hard in many cases because he helped them find positions.

At Brashear, “If you would walk into my classroom, into the shop area, you would think it was a legit body shop,” Lipovsky says, with cars, heavy duty lifts, and specialized equipment for repairs. In addition to the gear, he runs class like a shop so students leave with a level of familiarity. Among other things, that means working together to solve problems. Sometimes a student will come to Lipovsky with a question or a suggestion. He’ll ask the student to work with a classmate. “When you guys figure out what you want to do,” he’ll tell them, “come see me, we’ll discuss it.”

Lipovsky describes his classroom as an open place where students can express themselves and explore. If it takes a student three months to master a skill on the competency task list, he’s fine with that. When it comes time for him to sign off, though, there’s no negotiating. “I have to be assured that he or she knows how to do that task on their own with 100 percent being 100 percent, because there’s no 50 percent knowing how to do something,” he says.

Like other CTE teachers, Lipovsky collaborates with CTE English and math “integration” teachers, who support students’ academic learning. After meeting with the math teacher to plan how to teach a math skill, he’ll present it to students in a real-world context. “It really changes their thoughts,” he says, from “this is a math problem” to “this is related to the task we’re doing.” He’s also co-taught with a physics teacher, who was surprised that Lipovsky’s students “already had a basic concept of what she was trying to say” because of their experiences with repairing car frames. He looks for those moments when “the light bulb goes off” and he sees a student thinking, “Oh, I understand what he’s saying, finally.”

When the building closed in March of 2020, Lipovsky felt he was one step ahead of other teachers because his curriculum was already online. At the same time, he couldn’t provide the hands-on learning that had drawn students to the program. He also couldn’t take them to the collision centers and dealerships they usually visited, at least in person. So he started driving around to the shops where his ex-students worked and asked them to give his classes virtual tours via Microsoft Teams.

In the fall, he persuaded Principal Kimberly Safran to let him return to the nearly empty building. Alone in the classroom, he conducted demonstrations and prepped students for the certifications they could earn online. Almost all of them logged on each day. “I was really surprised they were showing up for me,” he says, given that they had to participate through a screen.

Some had begun to work on their family cars at home, and several agreed to livestream demonstrations for their classmates. Lipovsky had always featured peer-to-peer learning in his classroom, so it wasn’t completely new to them. Like their teacher, they talked through what they were doing and explained the tools they were using. “It was really something to see,” he says.

Health Careers Technology at Carrick

The district’s largest CTE program is Health Careers Technology at Carrick, where Celina Reese teaches 11th and 12th graders. Most students come into the program planning to go into nursing, she says, but others have wanted to pursue careers in pharmacy, athletic training, veterinary science and even mortuary science. Reese worked as a registered nurse in a variety of settings before becoming a teacher, and she wants to expose her students to a range of jobs in health care professions. “They’re all looking for who they are and hoping that this helps them to figure that out,” she says. In part because of the amount of time they spend together, and in part because she’s “a nurse to [her] core,” Reese says, “I have a really wonderful relationship with all my students.” Like Lipovsky, she maintains relationships after they leave the school.

To help students figure out where their niche might be, the program draws on the significant resources of the city. Before the pandemic, among other experiences, students visited Allegheny General Hospital every year. They saw central supply and how tools are sterilized for the OR, areas with jobs students hadn’t known existed before. They also observed open-heart surgery. While watching the process, one girl became fascinated with the role of the perfusionist, who operates the heart-lung bypass machine during an operation. She is now studying to be a perfusionist because of that experience, Reese says. By contrast, when students come in with a fixed idea and little knowledge, she advises them, “See if you can shadow, because the way we picture things in our mind is always very different than the way that they are.”

At Carrick, part of her classroom is set up to mimic a hospital room. A mannequin lies on one of the beds; when he’s plugged in, he emits simulated breath and stomach sounds. A small office area, set up like an exam room, contains a scale to measure height and weight and a portable machine for taking vital signs.

Students partner up to be nurse and patient. They also learn through scenarios Reese poses. A woman comes in with low blood pressure and a low temperature. Is she hypothermic, or losing blood? What should you do first? A man comes in with a headache. Should you give him Tylenol or perform a head scan? Reese says scenarios allow her to see how students’ minds are working and to push them toward higher-level thinking.

As part of the class, students learn about the systems of the body, anatomy, physiology, human reproductive biology, and a lot of math. Twice a week, a CCAC instructor comes to the class to teach Medical Terminology and Introduction to Psychology courses. Beyond the knowledge and skills students must develop to be successful in their chosen fields, Reese tries to “help them grow into accountable, thoughtful individuals.” One item on the task list refers to discussing ethical dilemmas in healthcare. Her class has talked about everything from the ethics of euthanasia to what to do if you drop a patient’s pill on the floor.

When Covid-19 closed the school, her students lost access to the classmates whose temperatures and blood pressures they’d been taking, but “we were able to look at what was happening around us every day,” Reese says. She sent home kits with PPE and blood pressure cuffs, and encouraged them to record themselves practicing skills. And “we talked a lot about Covid—where it came from, how it’s treated, what we should be looking for.” She also found guest speakers who could speak to the crisis, including some from Duquesne University’s public health program.

A place in the world

Before the pandemic, Health Careers Technology students from Carrick, Perry, and Westinghouse traveled to Presbyterian SeniorCare, which has two campuses north of the city in Oakmont. With a School Partnership Workforce grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, Presbyterian SeniorCare staff created the High School Career Pathways Program to introduce young people to senior living and long-term care careers. Since the 2018-19 school year, 18 PPS students have completed paid internships, nine were offered jobs after graduation, and more than 300 have visited the campuses for a day. According to Reese and Laurie Lesoon, director of lifestyle engagement for independent living residents, the experience went far beyond a field trip.

Students spent the morning shadowing employees in their areas of interest and touring the campuses to view the different levels of care. At lunchtime, they gathered in the ballroom to share a meal with selected independent living residents who’d had highly successful careers. Lesoon says the idea was, “Let’s bring them together with students who are about to step out of high school and step into the world.”

To facilitate discussion, students and residents were given questions to ask one another as prompts, along with the questions they had prepared themselves. One prompt was a “pretty pointed” question for residents about their mistakes and personal regrets, Lesoon says, which led to some heartfelt conversations. In turn, residents’ willingness to be transparent “created a safe space for the students to open up and talk about some of their struggles.” For one activity, participants wrote responses on blank puzzle pieces to the questions, “What does it take to build a community? What does it take to change a community?” Putting the ideas together gave the groups a sense that problems could be solved.

Reese doesn’t want to downplay the job shadowing opportunity offered at the center. But her students’ focus was on the conversations over the lunch table, she says. “They come back and they’re all smiling. And they’re telling me about the different people that they met. ‘My lady was an author!’ ‘My guy was a doctor!’ Just telling me about their lives and stories and taking so much from that.”

Back at the senior care community, Lesoon says the residents had difficulty processing students’ stories of hardship. But mostly they were excited that “these are our future leaders,” she says. The overwhelming response was, “We’ve got some bright kids out there. Our future is in good hands.”

Comprehensive information about the PPS CTE program is available at pghschools.org/cte, including links to competency task lists for each program, classroom videos, and information about electives non-CTE students can take.

Photos are of students in the Automotive Body Repair CTE program at Brashear. Photo credit: 232 Creative.

Check out the 2021 Report to the Community to see Brashear’s data on pages 104-105 and Carrick’s data on pages 106-107.