WLC shares impact on local middle, high school students

   Kristine Bullock, director of the Kirkwood Community College Workplace Learning Connection (WLC) provided her yearly update to the Jones County Supervisors during their Jan. 30 board meeting.

   WLC also requested $2,064.60 for FY 2025, which is based on the 2020 Census population (20,646).

   For FY 2023, WLC had revenue of $804,331. The majority of that, 54 percent, stemmed from state and federal grants. Contributions, such as county funding, makes up 8 percent of their yearly revenue.

   WLC also gets funding, 5 percent, from the Grant Wood AEA.

   “As you may have heard, the AEAs are facing some changes in the state legislature right now. We don’t know what that will look like. We’re really hopeful we can continue our Grant Wood AEA funding that we get,” said Bullock. “Should that change, we’ve got some flexibility in some of the funding areas.”

   WLC is made up of a team of 16 spread across a seven-county region, which includes Jones County.

   Tris Langdon serves Jones County through the Jones County Regional Center in Monticello.

   “Our whole goal is to prepare students with work-based learning experiences that happen early on so they can have multiple touchpoints out in the local community, learn about careers, hear from different business professionals, get into those businesses,” said Bullock.

   These opportunities start in sixth grade, and continue through 12^th grade.

   “We’re really excited this year because previously we haven’t had Monticello engaging at our middle school level; they only wanted their 11^th and 12^th grade students doing job shadows. They’ve now expanded to have the whole continuum of offerings.”

   Middle schoolers take part in WLC’s STEAM Institute, where they get hands-on sessions with businesses. They also offer a financial literacy fair.

   “Students take a career of interest inventory and pick a career and see what that salary is and see how that actually functions if they were to rent an apartment or buy a house, pay their utilities.”

   High school students are able to take advantage of job shadow opportunities and internships.

   For 2021-22, WLC reported 2,594 job shadows and 451 internships. For 2022-23, they saw 3,801 job shadows and 420 internships.

   “We saw that we have over 4,000 students request these job shadows this year,” Bullock noted. “A really big push from our schools that they want more opportunities for students to engage with businesses.”

   The biggest areas of interest for job shadows in Jones County include engineering and healthcare.

   WLC transitioned their internship program this year so that students receive four credits for taking part.

   “Some schools offer an internship credit at the high school level, but for that, you have to have a teacher who has a multi-occupations (MOC) endorsement. It’s actually pretty hard to find. Some of our largest districts have one MOC for their whole district. So we transitioned our internship program to be a Kirkwood credit; the schools do not have to have a teacher with that license because it’s taught by our instructors. It also creates consistent coding for the state. The state is really tracking work-based learning experiences now. We found that districts weren’t all coding it the same. Some schools looked like they were doing nothing when they really were. Schools are also required to get Perkins funding that 10 percent of their students have to participate in a work-based learning experience at the internship level. So this allows them to code it correctly, which then allows them to track it correctly, and allows them to get the funding.”

   Every October, WLC offers a Career Discovery Tour across all seven of the counties they serve.

   “We have about 60 businesses that welcome over 1,000 middle school and high school students. This was the first year that we were able to get Jones County businesses that were willing to do that. We had students from Jones County, but also other counties come in. That’s another great way for bringing students who are not from this county to see what great career opportunities there are here.”

   Through internships and job shadows, in Jones County, Bullock shared that 60 percent of the students who took part “were offered additional employment opportunities. The rural counties really see that they want to keep those local people here.”