Program excites Bentonville education, business leaders

BENTONVILLE -- Momentum is building in the School District for implementing a program giving high school students the chance to learn and gain skills while working closely with Northwest Arkansas employers.

District administrators, business leaders and community members have traveled to the Kansas City area several times within the past year to observe two Center for Advanced Professional Studies programs -- commonly referred to as CAPS -- in action. Superintendent Michael Poore has made three trips to see the programs, he said.

Blue Valley CAPS

The Blue Valley School District in Kansas runs a Center for Advanced Professional Studies program with the following enrollment requirements. Interested students need to:

• attain junior or senior status

• desire to work in a profession-based, real-world environment with other Blue Valley high school students

• be willing to comply with business ethics and dress codes determined by the type of CAPS study they are involved in

• be willing to spend two or three periods a day away from their home high school

• be able to provide their own transportation to CAPS and business partner sites

Source: www.bvcaps.org

The Blue Valley School District, which covers a portion of suburban Kansas City, Kan., has five high schools involved in its CAPS program. The nearby Northland CAPS program involves a consortium of six other districts.

Bentonville administrators hope to establish a similar program in which students serve as interns or provide professional services to small business and nonprofit clients in the community. Students and mentors would build professional relationships to solve real-world problems and gain valuable work experience.

The program would be implemented in phases, with phase one focusing on a single strand of study: computer science. That could start this year if the School Board approves it.

"We'll start small with that one course and one strand, and kind of work out the kinks of the overall program in that phase," said Andy Mayes, district director of technology.

Tata Consultancy Services has offered space for student collaboration and Wal-Mart has offered to host student interns, according to a presentation made earlier this month to the board. Northwest Arkansas Community College and the Ozark STEM Foundation also are involved. STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering and math.

The district eventually will introduce additional strands such as the construction trades, health professions and hospitality. The final step is to combine all of those strands into a regional innovation center to facilitate cross-curricular collaboration -- the kind of setup seen in the Kansas City area programs.

"That's where you see the magic happen," Mayes said.

Mayes described a project he observed at the Blue Valley CAPS center. Students in a programming class were building a website for the Kansas City Royals to provide an instant look at exactly which seats in the team's stadium are occupied at any given time. Down the hall, another group of students was figuring out how to install sensors for each seat. Yet another group in global business unit was working on a marketing plan for the team to use based on the data collected from the website.

That collaborative effort across multiple strands is what the district is aiming for, Mayes said.

The program teaches business skills and life skills, said Paul Stolt, the Bentonville district's communications director. It fits with the district's goal of making education real, relevant and relational to students, Stolt said.

The program also addresses employers' needs, Stolt said. In a recent survey of chief executive officers, almost all respondents said their companies face a skills gap.

"What this program would do is address some of these critical skills that have been identified by business leaders as skills their workers need to have," Stolt said.

Kurt Haas, a Wal-Mart home office employee and co-founder of the Ozark STEM Foundation, said the skills gap is real. CAPS is probably the best way to begin filling that gap, he said.

"There is an urgency," Haas said. "The urgency today is that if we don't have a way to introduce our students into something that is more real than standardized testing, then we may lose them."

Students handed him their business cards during his visit, Haas said.

"How many times have you had a student walk up to you and talk about the projects they're working on and give you their business cards?" he said.

Jon Cadieux, founder of the Northwest Arkansas Tech Council, said it shouldn't be a matter of deciding whether Bentonville should adopt the program, but when.

"This is something that is going to spread because it works. It is going to spread like crazy," Cadieux said. "I've talked to a lot of business leaders in the community through my connections and they are 100 percent behind it."

The program, which began at Blue Valley School District in 2009, is not widespread but has been adopted by some school districts in Iowa, Minnesota and Utah.

Brent Leas, a Bentonville School Board member, toured the Kansas City CAPS programs in February. He encouraged fellow board members to see the programs for themselves.

"To see it in action was much better than just hearing about it," Leas said. "To actually see it and be on the ground there is pretty cool."

Travis Riggs, board president, said former superintendent Gary Compton proposed a program like CAPS several years ago, but the board did not pursue it. Riggs was the only current board member on the board at that time.

"Everyone said no, that's not the right thing for us," Riggs said. "We should have done this four or five years ago. Sometimes it's just timing."

NW News on 03/27/2015

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