Vocational school marks 40th

Over 40 years ago, when dis­cus­sions for the Lorain County Joint Voca­tional School began, it’s doubt­ful any­one ever imag­ined the school would become what it is today.

As the school cel­e­brates its 40th school year, it has turned the cor­ner from being just a voca­tional school and has become much more. Today the school has become a career cen­ter where not only high school stu­dents come to build for their future, but one that adults turn to as the job mar­ket shifts to more high-tech jobs.

In 1969, William Bur­ton, the school’s first super­in­ten­dent, pur­chased 131 acres for $75,000 from a local farmer, Clarence Stevens. Accord­ing to Tina Salyer, mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions coor­di­na­tor at Lorain County JVS, it is rumored that the deal was done on a nap­kin at Presti’s restau­rant, in Oberlin.

When the five char­ter school dis­tricts — Amherst, Fire­lands, Key­stone, Ober­lin, and Welling­ton — came together to form the JVS dis­trict, 320 stu­dents enrolled to attend the school. Today, 13 school dis­tricts now make up the JVS and 2,000 stu­dents take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­nity to choose a career-technical pathway.

The first cur­ricu­lum approved by the JVS school board con­sisted of 16 pro­grams: agri­cul­ture busi­ness, agri­cul­ture mechan­ics, auto body repair, auto mechan­ics, clerk typ­ist, cos­me­tol­ogy, data account­ing, dis­trib­u­tive edu­ca­tion, diver­si­fied coop­er­a­tive train­ing, draft­ing, food ser­vice, high skill stenog­ra­pher, indus­trial elec­tric­ity, machine trades, occu­pa­tional work expe­ri­ence, and welding.

For years, the school was viewed by many to be a place where only stu­dents who were strug­gling with school and had no plans to attend col­lege would go. Today, many grad­u­ates from the school use the job skills they have learned to pay for advanced train­ing and college.

Data now shows that 89 per­cent of stu­dents are employed or pur­su­ing higher edu­ca­tion six months after graduation.

In the 1990s most joint voca­tional schools began to shift toward becom­ing known as career cen­ters, in part, to break away from the stigma sur­round­ing voca­tional schools, but also because the schools were offer­ing more than just a cer­tifi­cate of course com­ple­tion. Today, when JVS stu­dents grad­u­ate, they do so with indus­try stan­dard cer­ti­fi­ca­tions such as ASE and NATEF for auto mechan­ics and Microsoft and Cisco cer­ti­fi­ca­tions in the infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy pro­grams, mak­ing them much more attrac­tive in the job market.

“It’s really not your father’s voca­tional school any­more,” said Salyer.

Ask Salyer about some of the school’s suc­cess sto­ries, and she could go on for days talk­ing about stu­dents like Tiffany Barnes, who grad­u­ated from the JVS in 2005 from auto tech­nol­ogy and now works as a jour­ney­man iron­worker in Cleve­land, or James Collins, class of 1978 from the mar­ket­ing and man­age­ment pro­gram, who now is vice pres­i­dent and gen­eral man­ager for McDonald’s Corporation’s Florida region.

One of her favorites is of Greg Mezey, who took culi­nary arts and grad­u­ated in 2005. Mezey then went on to grad­u­ate from Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity in 2009 and now works as direc­tor of food and bev­er­age at the Statler Hotel in Ithaca, N.Y.

“I believe Greg is the first of our stu­dents who was an ivy lea­guer,” Salyer said.

The JVS con­tin­ues to look for ways to improve and help stu­dents build for their future. The school has part­nered with many of its mem­ber school dis­tricts to offer ninth and 10th graders pro­grams that allow them to begin their train­ing dur­ing their fresh­man and sopho­more years of high school, con­tinue their train­ing at the JVS, and fur­ther build upon it by attend­ing Lorain County Com­mu­nity College.

Look­ing back over the past 40 years of the school’s his­tory, it’s hard not to won­der what the next 40 will bring.

Posted by Scott Mahoney on Feb 9 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.