In the upcoming semesters, Hayes is going to experience many new courses that are aimed towards providing students with work certificates as soon as they graduate high school. These courses will help students skip the extra step of college and head straight into the workforce.
Principal Rex Reeder, assistant principal Jean Trimble and other administrators have been doing a lot of work implementing these programs. Administration has collaborated and used Trimble’s prior experience in other schools to put together these Pathways.
“I worked in a couple other districts,” Trimble said. “In Westerville, they had several Pathways. They had a health Pathway, and then they had an engineering Pathway through Project Lead the Way.“
The certificate Pathways coming to Hayes are engineering, advanced manufacturing, business and bookkeeping. With partnerships with Columbus State and Marion Tech, students can take a track of specific classes related to the certification they are looking for over the course of their high school career.
Along with certificates, multiple classrooms are being transformed into Paxton Patterson career exploration labs. This spring, one room will become a State-Tested Nurse Aid (STNA) lab to put students on track for nursing school. Two more rooms will become career exploration labs with stations for basic welding, electricity, early childhood development, game development and more. One of those rooms will be ready for the spring 2025 semester and the other for the fall 2025 semester.
“It’ll be geared towards freshmen and sophomores who don’t have an idea of what they want to do,” Career Exploration teacher Adrianah Melvin said. “From this class they are able to explore 15 different careers and then they’re able to set up their schedule [for the following years] with what makes the most sense for their career.”
Students in the class are looking forward to being in a new setting and having more resources to explore these careers with.
“I’m excited for the new environment we’re going to be in,” senior Bronwynn Leighty said. “We’re going to have a lot more tools to experiment with.”
Another Pathway, this one in connection with Ohio Wesleyan University (OWU), helps train future teachers. Providing prospective teachers with classes at Hayes to get a head start on their teaching journey and letting them go to OWU to finish that degree. Once they reach student teaching they are welcomed back to complete their training where they originally started their teaching career.
“It’s kind of like developing our own teachers here in Delaware,” Trimble said.
Along with these labs, administration is also working to add more classes to what is already offered at Hayes to fill any gaps in the certification Pathways. This means that more teachers will need to be trained to become certified in teaching College Credit Plus (CCP) classes.
“We just applied for a grant that would give money to Hayes to train our teachers to be CCP certified,” Trimble said.
As many of these courses as possible are going to be offered at Hayes, but there are a few courses that it will not be possible to have here. Trimble and the rest of administration are working out a possibility of bussing students to either Columbus State Community College or Marion Tech to fulfill those credits.
“So we haven’t decided [what we are doing] yet, but those are definitely considerations that we have of how we can get students there,” Trimble said. “Not everybody drives and not everybody has a car, and we want those opportunities to be available for everybody.”
Overall, these Pathways are aimed towards replacing college for the students who aren’t interested in higher education. Administration wants to provide them with real world experience they can use to secure a well paying job where they can continue their education in the workplace right after graduation.
“You have your whole life to go to college, if that’s something you want to do,” Trimble said. “But you could start working somewhere, and that company could be like, ‘Hey, we’re going to pay for you to go to school and if you learn how to do this, this and this, we’ll up your salary by 20,000 or 30,000.’”
With many job opportunities out there now, Trimble and the rest of the administration want Hayes to be set up for success.
“Those opportunities are there, right now, for kids in Central Ohio,” Trimble said. “We want the Pacers to be on the forefront, getting the jobs [straight] out of the gate.”
