Navigating college and career planning, and the college application process, can be daunting and intimidating for high school students.
Parsons USD 503 has worked to help relieve some of the stress by helping students organize their thoughts about their future, develop goals and work through them beginning in elementary school and continuing on into high school with various activities and classes.
Three years ago the district hired Kylie Lucas as an academic advisor at Parsons High School to help students as they near the completion of those plans, allowing them to make confident choices for life after graduation. The district had not had someone in a dedicated full-time position to teach college and career preparation and college orientation programs for more than a decade.
Data is showing filling the position is well worth it for students. All Lucas’ efforts are making a difference.
“As a district our five-year effective average has increased by almost 10% since the addition of Kylie Lucas,” Assistant Superintendent Jeff Pegues said. The effective rate is measured by the number of students who within two years of high school graduation complete an industry recognized certificate; a post secondary certificate; a post secondary degree or have enrolled in postsecondary both years following graduation. Students who enter the military are not included in the success rate, though the state is striving to change that.
Pegues said KSDE puts out a confidence interval for a district’s effectiveness every year. The district was sitting at 35% prior to Lucas coming on board, below the state’s determined rate for 503. The state says, with our at-risk factors, USD 503’s effectiveness rate should be between 41.5 and 44.6%.
“Our effectiveness rate is now 44.9%, which means we are outperforming our confidence interval predicted by the state. We had not exceeded our confidence interval until we hired Kylie Lucas for the academic advisor position,” Pegues said. “Our five year success rate is up 8% and our effective rate is up almost 10%. For the first time this year, USD 503 was also recognized with a Kansas Can Bronze Star Recognition for Individualized Plans of Study (IPS).
“An Individualized Plan of Study is driven by the Kansas State Department of Education. It is an initiative to help each individual student create a roadmap to their future. It starts as early as sixth grade but there are things USD 503 is doing in elementary. IPS is a plan built in conjunction with the student, the student's family, teachers, administration. It’s a group collaborative effort to determine what career path the student may want to pursue,” Lucas said. “Then we are ensuring the student is taking classes that will help ensure them reaching that career goal.”
Students continue to work on and adjust their plans as they move through high school.
To provide a starting point for students who may not have a direction in mind, in sixth grade the school also has students take the Matchmaker Assessment through a platform called Xello. The assessment helps determine what careers would be a good match for students based on their likes, dislikes, interests, strengths, and weaknesses. This connects them with certain careers and they can research those careers further through Xello. The middle school is also now taking students out to visit businesses downtown and learn what they do, exposing them directly to potential careers, from florist to tattoo artist.
Because youths go through so many changes at the middle school age, once students reach their freshman year at high school, they retake the assessment and their IPS is changed to reflect the differences.
In their sophomore year, all students are assisted in developing a resume and cover letter, and they fill out a generic job application. This is followed by mock interviews with representatives of businesses in the community.
As juniors and seniors, now that Lucas is there, students have the ability to take classes that more deeply focus on potential careers and college application processes.
In their junior year, students can take a College and Career Readiness class, through which they research and learn more about the 16 career pathways KSDE recognizes.
“That perfectly aligns with our 18 week semester, giving us a week at the front and the end.
Each week we have someone from the community come in who is a guest speaker with a connection to that specific pathway.
“It gives them a personal connection, a story, a community member to network with,” she said.
Students then do research into these pathways and choose a career they want to learn more about. They complete assignments and reflection on what it takes to get to that job and if they can envision themselves doing it.
Besides bringing people in, Lucas takes students out to visit local industries. All juniors and seniors, regardless of if they are taking Lucas’ classes, are able to go on the tours if they are in good standing in their classes.
“One of the aspects of her program that I really love is her taking them to the local businesses. I didn’t know what Tank Connection did, or Power Flame, or all the places. So taking the kids out, and touring Tank Connection, Ducommun, Sun Graphics, and knowing what is available here locally as an option is, I think, a good thing for our kids and our local businesses,” Pegues said. “College is maybe not the best path for all students with the cost of it, too.”
Learning how to fill out job applications, resumes and cover letters are all a big part of the curriculum. Junior year students also complete their job shadowing. Students have a minimum of one opportunity to shadow one person, one day, in their career area of interest, or as close as possible.
Come their senior year, students can focus more on college orientation.
“We have an entire week at the beginning of each semester dedicated to goal setting where we talk about academic goals, personal goals, financial goals, career goals and setting up SMART goals, which is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely goals. It’s not just saying ‘I have a goal, I want to go to college.’ Let’s make that more specific. When do you want to go to college, and which college, and what measurable daily or weekly tasks are you doing to make sure you are going to attain that goal?”
Students investigate degree requirements and what they are, if the college has a two or four year program, if they have to apply separately to that program from the college, and if there are prerequisites. They look at dual or concurrent enrollment classes they have taken, and use the KBOR transfer metric to make sure they fulfil a degree requirement for the major they plan to pursue, and if the classes they are taking at LCC even transfer to their college they plan to attend later. They look at accommodations and housing and learn what paperwork needs filled out and how. Most importantly, they map out a timeline.
“It’s a lot of preparation,” Lucas said. “Some students may not even know where to start in the whole process.”
Having an actual class time to devote to finding out the answers makes a world of difference for students.
“If you don’t have the time, or the resources, or the encouragement, you don’t know what you don’t know” Lucas said.
Between the two classes Lucas teaches, students are also working on soft skills that employers have reported are missing among those students entering the workforce: effective communication, good listening, eye contact, time management, being organized, being able to persevere through adversity, conflict resolution, being a team player.
“We try to implement activities and group projects and discussion that would help foster critical thinking and help develop those skills. We also get into some financial planning and budgeting,” Lucas said. “During that, we talk about how you can have your college paid for and reduce the cost. There’s so many scholarship dollars that are available and misconceptions about the free application for federal student aid. Talking about what the FAFSA is, introducing them to the lingo, helping them understand and complete the FAFSA, is all accomplished.
“In January we will have an event specific to FAFSA completion. We invite financial aid representatives from LCC and PSU. Those experts come and help answer questions and provide that confidence and talk it through. It makes the situation so much less stressful,” Lucas said.
Guidance filling out scholarship applications is also an essential part of the program.
“Applying for college, as well as finding the scholarship and financial aid needed to be able to attend college, has never been more difficult,” Pegues said. “ Many of our students here in Parsons don’t have the support at home to navigate this complicated and tedious process.”
As the admissions recruiter at LCC before taking the job at PHS, Lucas said she saw the difference it made for students at other schools who had even 50 minutes a day to fill out scholarship applications, so she knew the difference that could be made if PHS students were provided that sane guidance.
“These students, a lot of them, besides achieving well academically and being involved in extracurricular sports, theater, debate and forensics are also maintaining a job, so they are wearing different hats and they are all priorities,” Lucas said. “They are living in the moment thinking, ‘This is what I have to get done now, ‘ and by the time they get to high school graduation and they are thinking, ‘Oh, now it's college time, and I have to think about how I am going to pay for this,’ it’s missed. It’s too late. Those scholarship deadlines go back clear to the fall of their senior year. Oct. 1 is when a lot of those scholarship applications open and a lot of those scholarship dollars are given away on a first come first served basis. So the sooner you get that application submitted and finalised the more likely you will be to receive dollars.” Scholarships and financial aid is an ever changing world. It’s hard to keep up with.
“I think our counseling office was overworked in other areas with social emotional learning, programming and enrolling students. It was really at the students’ discretion to seek out those (college and scholarship) opportunities. When counselors were communicating the opportunity for scholarship dollars, often the students were not following through,” Lucas said. “I think that is because we’re in a low socioeconomic area so we have a lot of first generation college students and individuals whose parents don’t know how to help them because they never went through the process. On top of that it may have changed since they went.”
“Knowledge is power, so having the classroom environment has allowed us to have an engaged captive audience of students. It allows for them to carve out time during their day for someone, encouraging them and supporting them to get those things done,” Lucas said. “We are face to face every day… It's very individualized and unique how I work with them.”
“The addition of this position and the job Kylie has done for our students and district is immeasurable,” Pegues said. “We needed to see those kids every day and say, hey, remember this due date is coming up. This is here and this is here. It’s that complex that you need to see them every day.”
Lucas said she is excited to see the courses are making a difference for students. Students are receiving far more scholarships than before. More students are filling out the FAFSA. More students are networking and some are taking jobs directly out of high school with local businesses, because they have taken the courses they needed to open those doors.
Pegues said the district would like to provide more on the job training opportunities for students and maybe start a pathway at PHS that fits to what Tank Connection or Ducommun needs, helping students go straight into the workforce here.
“But it’s finding those teachers at the high school level, too. We’re going to have a hard time replacing Bruce Rea (drafting), or automotive technology (Dave Ferguson). Brett Heady (retired) has come in to help us out in automotive, but it’s difficult to find those people that will leave a $100,000 job in industry to come teach,” Pegues said.