Page 10
Career & Education
March 25, 2015
Happy Birthday
Chris Baldwin II
Love Your Family
f red J oe /C ourtesy P ortland P ubliC s Chools
Students from northeast Portland’s Vestal K-8 Elemen-
tary School visit Portland Community College’s South-
east Campus for College Night. They ate food and heard
from college students about the college experience.
Photo by
Getting Ready for
College and Career
Expo brings real world learning
Getting ready for college
and career took on new mean-
ing for the more than 3,000
Portland Public students who
mingled with some of the re-
gion’s major employers at the
NW Youth Careers Expo earli-
er this March
The non-profit Portland
Workforce Alliance organized
the event. PWA has collaborat-
ed with the district since 2005
to build partnerships between
Oregon businesses and Port-
land-area students with the
goal of producing a skilled lo-
cal workforce that can compete
for great local jobs.
The partnership is one way
PPS is attacking a key priori-
ty for the district and Superin-
tendent Carole Smith: helping
more students graduate from
high school on time, poised to
attend college and launch their
careers.
Students who are involved
in career education are signifi-
cantly more likely to graduate
from high school, according
to national research and PPS
data. Students who leave high
school with a better sense of
career possibilities are more
likely to go to college, graduate
from college and earn a degree
on time.
“Figuring out what you
don’t want to do is just about
as important as figuring out the
thing that inspires your passion
and fuels you,” Smith told em-
ployers, students and officials
who turned out for a break-
fast to kick off the expo. “It’s
become really awesome, the
kinds of things employers are
doing in order to create career
days, internships, job shadows
or hands-on experiences that
really allow students to come
in and figure out what you do
and to see what is going on in
the real world.”
Several students spoke up
about how attending a PWA
career day with employers
such as
Nike, Mercy Corps, How-
ard S. Wright, Microsoft and
Kaiser Permanente inspired
them to dig in deeper at high
school. Franklin High School
senior Antonio Crosier went
from getting ho-hum grades to
taking six advanced placement
classes after hooking up with
the ACE Mentor Program. The
after-school opportunity helps
high school students find their
career passions and educational
paths toward family-wage jobs
in architecture, construction
and engineering. Next year,
Antonio will study architecture
at Portland State University.
The expo gave Benson High
School student Naomi Likayi
a chance to tell Tim Williams
– executive director of the
state office that promotes the
development of the film, vid-
C ontinued on P age 18