CASN

Presentation by:
Anne J. Scott,Principal
Larry Stewart, Academy Director
Highland Energy/Environmental Technology (HEET) Academy
Highland High School,
2900 Royal Scots Road,
Bakersfield, CA 93306
Phone: 1-805-872-2777
Fax: 1-805-871-6052

Assemble your academy team (faculty, counselors, administrators, college representative) and develop answers to the following questions. This may take some research. We found 562 telephone directory entries directly tied to the petroleum industry alone.

Keep your definition as broad as possible to include lots of business partners. Example: Energy/Environmental Technology

Example: Electric, gas, oil, co-ceneration, waste management, wind, equipment supplies, parks, raceway, packaging, environmental technology

What are some leading companies in your city/county associated with this industry?

Example: Pacific Gas & Electric, Aera Energy, Texaco, Arco, Occidental, Chevron, Berry Petroleum, Destec Co-Generation, Sanitation Services, Mesa Marin Raceway, Tenneco Packaging, Kern County Parks, Burea of Land Management, Department of Conservation

Example: Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce Petroleum Sub-Committee

Example: Bakersfield College environmental technology program and industrial technology department

Example: Kern/South Tulare Tech Prep Consortium; Kern County Academy Council; Kern County School to Career Consortium

Who do you know who is associated with this industry (parents, friends, school board member, current school business partners in other areas)?

Example: School board member who is president of a waste management company, a parent who is the CEO of an oil company, a friend who works for Texaco, a PG&E representative who is married to a Highland teacher, Destec Co-generation plant which is located close to the school

Organize an academy team that includes administrators, faculty and counselors to recruit your first business partners.

It is most important that administrators, including the principal, be involved with business partner recruitment from the very beginning. You need to provide released time for faculty to help plan the recruitment process and to make visits to industry sites. If this activity occurs during the summer, you need to provide faculty stipends. (See budget)

Print lots of these brochures so that you can distribute them wherever and whenever you talk to people about your academy.

Develop a plan that assigns recruitment of specific potential business partners to members of your academy team.

Define the term "business partner" as a company, not an individual, at this stage of your recruitment process. Pick the top 10 business partners that you would like to have for your academy. Ask each member of the team if they have a personal contact that they can make. We have found that CEOs and other industry representatives expect to be initially contacted by an administrator if you are calling cold.

Example: PG&E has been a previous business partner, and the public relations director is married to a teacher at the school; WSPA represents all the major oil companies in the region; Aera Energy has a history of providing support for schools; Destec Co-Generation is located near the school and has provided financial support previously; Sanitation Service has a school board member as CEO; a Texaco official is a friend of the academy director; the Tenneco Packaging plant manager served on the school's Tech Prep steering committee when that program began; the local raceway manager is a friend of academy director; the CEO of a local oil company is a parent at the school; an oil company has several school graduates now working there.

Make phone contacts and set up appointments to personally explain your academy.

Invite the potential business partner to be a member of the academy's steering committee that will organized the academy and make the decisions regarding curriculum, budget, calendar, activities, etc. Stress how your academy will provide students with factual positive knowledge about the industry and encouragement to enter the industry.

Ask the business parter for a letter of formal endorsement for your academy.

This letter may be attached to any grant applications that you develop for your academy and is useful to show to other potential business partners.

You need to include academy faculty, counselors, administrators, secretary, business partners and college representatives. The business partner determines the employee(s) who will represent it on the steering committee.

Example: The HEET Academy steering committee includes the principal, assistant principal, four teachers, two counselors, Title I coordinator, nine business partners, four college representatives, and the secretary.

Hold an organizational meeting to determine place, time and frequency of meetings and who will serve as chair. Set a steering committee calendar for the year.

Example: Quarterly meetings, school's faculty dining room, 7-8 a.m., continental breakfast, principal serves as chair.

You need to buy secretarial time out of your grant or have the school provide secretarial time. The secretary will take minutes and mail them to members, send reminder notices, develop the agenda in consultation with the academy director and principal, handle any phone calls from members, etc.

The steering committee members are busy people. You need to make sure that steering committee meetings are productive. Use the expertise of your steering committee members to guide the development and operation of your academy. Establish the subjects that will be brought before the steering committee for review and approval.

Example: Review curriculum, establish standards, plan student activities and field trips, approve the annual budget, approve the annual report, plan how to recruit additional business partners, evaluate completed activities, plan student celebrations, provide industry information, solve problems that develop, etc.

Some of our most interesting projects and activities have come out of brainstorming sessions when a steering committee member has said "what if we do this?".

Example: Hazardous materials 25 hour training with college credit that is being provided by Bakersfield College on our campus for 46 HEET Academy junior students.

Business partners are companies, public agencies, colleges and individuals employed in the industry. Your steering committee needs to define what you need from business partners beyond serving on the steering committee. As your academy program develops, your goal should be to expand your business partner base to include a great variety of resource people who can assist you in all aspects of the program.

What are the business partner roles and responsibilities as outlined in the Career Academy model?

Using the Career Academy model you will want to recruit business partners to provide workplace learning experiences, serve as mentors, and offer intern opportunities as well as serving on the steering committee. For the HEET Academy we define workplace learning experiences as field trips, classroom speakers and job shadowing which occurs as part of the mentor program.

We quickly learned that individuals who volunteer as business partners have varied talents that they are willing to share with students. Our job is to match those talents with our needs. A business partner may be willing to come to the classroom one day and talk about his job. Another business partner may volunteer to set up a field trip at her business. A trio of business partners may agree to work together and mentor some students. Whatever a new business partner volunteers to do, we try to arrange to make it happen.

We ask our company business partners to provide us with one field trip site each year which will give 50 sophomore or junior students a half or whole day tour/ experience in the workplace. If that is difficult to do, we ask that they take a smaller group of students. If that is impossible, we ask that they provide a classroom experience.

We ask that our company business partners provide us with opportunities to recruit mentors and that the mentors be able to use business time to work with out students.

We never ask for money. In our initial presentation, we explain that we are asking for a much more valuable contribution: the time and talents of individuals. However, we do get contributions of money, equipment, faculty training, and meals while on field trips. This occurs when a business partner wants to do something with our academy students and realizes that the school doesn't have the resources to accomplish the task.

Example: Aera Energy introduced the academy faculty at GIS software. Aera wants our students to know how to use the software but the school doesn't own it, and our teachers aren't trained on it. So we just received a check for $500 from Aera to buy the software, and Aera staff will train the faculty and then teach the students.

Business partners are wonderful, but if you recruit lots of talented individuals who want to work with your students, you need to develop a calendar to organize all the academy activities. The HEET Academy develops and prints a calendar each semester. We schedule monthly field trips, classroom activities, mentor activities, due dates for semester projects, parent meetings, student celebrations, and industry events.

The academy calendar is developed by the academy faculty. Much of the work on it is done during the summer when the teachers contact business partners and set up field trips and classroom activities for the coming year. HEET Academy teachers are each paid a $1,000 summer stipend for academy work. They also schedule evening meetings with parents and quarterly celebrations of student achievement.

Work on the calendar is continuous because dates get changed and new opportunities emerge. It is on the computer and updated and printed frequently to reflect the changes.

Business partners can bring the industry to the classroom. Highland blocks its academy classes so that all sophomores or all juniors may come together for a presentation. HEET academy headquarters are in one building with a large classroom that can hold 50 students comfortably. All HEET math classes are conducted here. The classroom is adjacent to two large science labs that are also used by the academy for the academy technology and applied physics classes. The academy has access to computer labs. This classroom complex has evolved over the two years of the HEET Academy's existence in response to the varied activities pursued within the academy.

Business partners may provide general information about their industry, may provide support for the academic disciplines taught within the academy, or may offer specialized training. Ideas for classroom presentations frequently come from the steering committee's business partners. Academy team members are always alert to new possibilities for presentations, and we find that ideas often emerge when we're having informal discussions at industry functions or on field trips or working with mentors. Often, a business partner will recommend that we contact a colleague who has particular expertise that can be shared.

Examples: Cal Resources (now Aera Engergy) provided a panel of speakers who discussed the desirable qualities that employers look for when hiring. This reinforced the SCANS competencies that all teachers emphasize. Texaco introduced the students to safety training in a classroom presentation and later provided a field trip to learn on-site safety techniques. Bakersfield College is currently teaching a 25 hour Hazardous Materials (HazMat) class in the HEET classroom that will provide the juniors with college credit. Highland students keep career portfolios that contain resumes, completed job applications, samples of written work, etc. Business partners are asked to critique these portfolios and provide mock job intereviews for students.

The HEET Academy began by trying to schedule a classroom presentation every two weeks. This schedule, coupled with a monthly field trip, quarterly celebration of student accomplishments, group research projects, and the need to teach a college prep curriculum in English, math, and biology to students who had previously been general level, exhausted our teachers. We are now much more flexible about classroom presentations, and schedule them whenever they seem appropriate. The junior HazMat training is taking a major time commitment, but the advantage of offering a college class on campus at no cost to students was too good to turn down.

The monthly field trip experience has been a major component in the success of the HEET Academy. Approximately seven field trips are provided for students each year. The 10th grade field trips have emphasized the oil industry while the 11th grade field trips have emphasized environmental technology.

During the summer the HEET Academy teachers meet and outline a tentative calendar of field trips related to topics that the students will be studying during the year. Each teacher volunteers to organize specific trips. That teacher is responsible for contacting the business partner and arranging the date, place, time, etc. of a trip. The HEET Academy secretary schedules school buses to transport the students. Transportation costs are funded through the Career Academy grant. A majority of HEET students are on the free/reduced lunch program, and the school cafeteria provides free sack lunches for those students. The grant pays for sack lunches for the other students. Two academy teachers or one teacher and an administrator or counselor go on each field trip. Because of the block scheduling, only one substitute has to be hired to cover two academy teachers. Substitute costs are budgeted through the grant. All counselors and administrators are encouraged to participate in one field trip each year.

The school has obtained signed parent permission forms that cover all HEET academy activities during the school year.

Students must wear their HEET Academy white polo shirts on the field trip. To participate in a field trip students must be in good standing in the class which means no recent attendance cuts or discipline referrals.

The business partner company provides the site for the field trip. Business partners within the company provide activities for students at the site. This may include presentations, tours, demonstrations, and hands on opportunities. We go with what the business partner wants to provide. Last year we provided eight field trips for our sophomores. We had more offers of field trips than we needed, and some business partners complained because they didn't get to participate.

Example: Tour waste management facilities throughout the county led by the school board member who heads a waste management company; tour the Texaco Kern River Field; visit Berry Petroleum headquarters and oil fields which included a lunch provided by the company; view Arco Coles Levee Project; tour Destec Co-Generation plant and headquarters; participate in a BLM Geologic Survey at Hart Park; view the industrial technology department at Bakersfield College.

The Career Academy guidelines call for adult mentors at the junior year. Recruiting business partners as mentors has been the HEET Academy's greatest challenge to date. The academy team used the mentor materials presented at the state Career Academy conference and found them extremely helpful. However, convincing a busines partner that he wanted to mentor a student has been much more difficult than organizing classroom presentations or field trips.

The HEET Academy team adapted materials from Developing a Mentor Program For a Partnership Academy by Lisa Vujovich. A HEET Academy mentor information package was developed and printed. The teachers tried to make contacts with company business partners during the summer to set up mentor presentations, however, companies were reluctant to schedule any employee presentations during the summer because of vacations.

Highland solved its mentor recruitment problem by enlisting the services of a retired Kern High School District administrator who took on the activity as a 30 day post retirement project. The district approved the project for funding; this was a $9,000 district matching investment. This administrator had served at the adult school and had extensive industry contacts. He also had a son and daughter-in-law employed in the oil industry. The retired administrator set up appointments for both himself and the teachers and administrators to present the mentor program. He brought out prospective mentors to view the academy classes and meet HEET students. He made personal contacts with industry public relations officials and left Highland mentor materials for distribution to all employees.

The district has agreed to fund this project for next year, however, this retired administrator is no longer eligible for a post-retirement project. A new retiree will have to be recruited and trained.

The HEET Academy currently has 27 adult mentors. Mentors are asked to meet with their mentees once each month. An information session and lunch activity was provided to introduce the mentors to their students. A schedule of monthly mentor activities has been developed, however, mentors do not have to participate in these events. Mentors were asked to provide a February job shadow experience for their student.

On their mentor information/application forms, most of the mentors wrote that they wanted to assist the students with their academic work, and tutoring sessions have been scheduled. Some mentors have volunteered to work with two mentees, and some mentors work as teams sharing a group of students.

A great way to gain business partners and financial support is for your academy to be formally adopted by a company or an organization. This is particularly important if your school is located in a large city and competes with other schools for support.

Formal partnerships may be developed with a specific business, a support organization for an industry, a school-to-career organization, or any other group that interfaces with that industry. Your job is to convince the business or organization that your academy has unique ties to them that make a formal partnership logical and productive. The business or organization needs to see some value for them as a result of partnering your academy.

Example: The HEET Academy is the only energy academy in Bakersfield and Kern County. We made a presentation to the Petroleum Subcommittee of the Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce explaining the HEET Academy goals. The petroleum subcommittee has a goal of promoting the industry in the community so local residents have a better understanding of the positive values of the industry. What better way to accomplish this goal than to formally sponsor a high school energy academy! We are now listed as a formal project for the subcommittee to support, and a representative sits on the HEET Academy steering committee.

A formal partnership with a business or organization will provide your academy with a number of advantages:

You gain access to all the employees and/or to the roster of members so that you can then recruit individual business partners.

You may get specified annual commitments of personnel time and talent.

You get support which may include actual grants, used equipment, attendance at industry functions, etc.

Your academy gains status as your formal partnership is publicized by the company.

You may want to become an affilitate member of an organization that can provide your academy with specialized knowledge of assistance.

Example: The HEET Academy is an affilitate member of the Western Division, Partnership for Environmental Technology Education (Western PETE), a junior college association. This costs the academy $100 annually but it provides access to conferences, research materials, etc. and an opportunity to interact with environmental experts.

A local community college or a four-year state university can be a great business partner. Many of your academy students will be attending this college, and you need to be working closely together. Therefore, you need to include the college from the very beginning in your academy planning.

The college should have representatives on the academy steering committee. These representatives should come from appropriate departments and programs.

Example: The HEET Academy steering committee includes the chair of the industrial technology department at Bakersfield College (BC) and the head of the BC environmental technology program. A second environmental technology staff member also attends. The director of the Kern/South Tulare Tech Prep Consortium run by BC has been a steering committee member since the HEET Academy began. She wrote a letter of support that accompanied the initial planning grant.

The college business partners can offer advice on curriculum development, particularly in the technical academy classes. They may provide actual college courses for academy students.

Example: BC is teaching its introductory Hazardous Materials course to the HEET Academy juniors. They will earn college credit for the course.

The college should be the site of a field trip each year to learn about college program related to the industry, learn how to access the college library to do research, and learn about the college application process.

Example: Through the Tech Prep Consortium the HEET Academy's technical classes have received textbooks and equipment. Highland has all HEET academy students take Principles of Technology (Applied Physics) 1 and 2, a two year sequence. The Consortium originally provided a $30,000 grant for Priniciples of Technology equipment and annually gives the school a mini-grant for replacement equipment.

The college can introduce the academy faculty to other sources of information related to the industry.

Example: It was the BC environmental technology director who invited the HEET Academy science teachers to accompany her to a Western PETE conference.

It is very important that you view a company as the business partner rather than tie all your company contacts to one individual within the company. Change happens. Individuals are transferred, get new responsibilities, develop new community interests, and the academy is no longer a high priority. We've struggled with this situation in several instances and have learned to get a company commitment with the understanding that individuals may vary from year to year.

Example 1: We had an individuial who served as a business partner when we became a model Tech Prep school. That individual then became a member of our academy steering committee. Through her efforts the HEET Academy received a grant of $5,000 and was a field trip site last year. However, this business partner was transferred to the mid-west last summer, and her successor has not answered any of our phone calls to date. We again received a check for $5,000 from the company but it was labeled to go for Project 2000 activities which is an entirely different district program currently inactive. We finally convinced the school district that the check should be deposited for the HEET Academy, but we don't know what our future is with this company.

Example 2: Cal Resources was an original business partner that formally supported our Career Academy grant application. For the planning year and first year of implementation, the individual who wrote that letter served on our steering committee. However, she involved a variety of other employees in academy projects. Cal Resources merged with Mobil to form Aera Energy last year, and our steering committee member assumed new responsibilities. However, she arranged for Highland to become a formal partner with Aera Energy and had a successor named to the academy steering committee.

One of your major academy goals should be to keep your business partners pleased with their roles within your academy. To succeed in this regard you need to be aware of any business partner concerns and immediately respond. Concerns will range from the individual partner who has an immediate problem to the company which may have a long range problem.

Individual business partners may be great in their professional jobs but very uncertain about working with teenagers. They will have questions about how to successfully handle their academy responsibilities. You need to have a process to handle their questions and reduce their anxiety. Academy faculty need to understand that when they are assigned a specific responsibility to accomplish, part of that task is to guide the business partners who are participating in the activity.

Example: Each faculty member is responsible for working with specific business partners who are serving as mentors. If a mentor has a question, she calls that academy faculty member. Alternatively, you could assign one academy faculty member the responsibility of the mentor program, and that teacher would then handle all mentor concerns.

Concerns often focus on the scheduling of activities. That is why it is so important that every activity be assigned to a specific faculty member who will organize it, contact the business partner, and maintain contact until the activity is completed. An academy secretary can play an important role in handling scheduling concerns and other minor problems. She needs to know everything that is going on with regard to business partners so that she can take calls and often settle the problem immediately by providing the needed information. She can also find out information and relay it back to the business partner.

Example: The HEET Academy uses two hours of a full time Highland secretary. That secretary also handles the school's college/career program for two hours and works in the attendance office for four hours. Our understanding is that her time is flexible, and she may respond to academy calls throughout the day.

The academy director and administrators should handle major concerns that affect an entire company or organization. They need to talk with the company representative, assess the seriousness of the concern, and determine how and if it can be solved. It is important that a principal become involved with a major concern because the business partner may work with the school in other areas beyond the academy. Sometimes, a major concern is beyond the academy's ability to solve because the industry is experiencing problems. Then you adjust and move on.

Business partners volunteer to assist an academy for a number of reasons. These include wanting to assist young people to succeed, wanting to recruit young people to enter the industry, wanting to give back to the community because they were once assisted, and wanting approval from their company for their community activities or the company wanting approval from the community and/or its national headquarters.

You need to provide your business partners with positive publicity about the jobs they are doing with your academy.

Positive publicity about your business partner activities assists in a variety of ways. It gives strokes to individual business partners while encouraging other employees to volunteer to work with your academy. It enhances the company image in the community. If the company is national, it helps the local office to impress national headquarters with their volunteer spirit and industry promotional efforts.

Example: The energy industry gains mixed reactions from the general public. When Highland first proposed an energy/environmental technology academy, potential energy industry business partners worried that the students might attack the industry. We explained that it gave the industry an opportunity to present its operations in a positive way. Newspaper articles about our field trips have always presented the industry favorably, quoting positive student reactions while explaining what the students had seen and learned.

You should try to provide ongoing publicity about your academy activities. Because most of these activities involve business partners, your goal can simply be to keep the academy visible in the school and community. Each edition of the school newspaper can have an academy story, and the parent newsletter should have an academy update. The public relations representatives of our company business partners keep in contact with the school and write frequent articles for the company newsletters. The community newspaper and television stations like to accompany students on field trips to interesting business sites. These stories provide visual human interest with students shown interacting with industry representatives.

Principal Partners Day always generates positive publicity. If your school or district has a principal partners day, it becomes a great opportunity to host your current business partners or include potential business partners. This day may give them a total picture of the school or it could focus on the role of the academy within the school.

Example 1: The Kern High School District holds an annual Principal Partners Day, and each school hosts 15 to 20 business leaders. This year Highland invited all the members of the petroleum subcommittee of the Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce, an official academy business partner, and concentrated on presenting the HEET academy. Some of the individuals who attended had not been active in the academy previously, but three signed up to be mentors the next day.

Example 2: The KHSD always invites respresentatives from the local offices of the state senator and assemblyman to attend Principal Partners Day. This year Highland hosted the local representative of an assemblyman who seemed very impressed with the HEET Academy. We have subsequently heard that this assemblyman will support the state budget increase in the Career Academy allocation.

You can never believe that you have enough business partners. And you always need to have an academy responsibility ready to be assigned to a new recruit.

Change happens. Companies dissolve or change their community focus, and individuals leave the company or industry or grow tired. You need to view each business partner as a desirable long term connection but a real business partner for the immediate future which is defined as this year.

Example: Bechtel Petroleum was an original HEET Academy business partner. The company was already a sponsor of the area Science Bowl which Highland had won for several years, and a parent was a Bechtel engineer. Bechtel was very enthusiastic about supporting the HEET Academy with field trips, speakers and mentors. But then the federal government decided to sell the Elk Hills petroleum reserve and Bechtel's job in Bakersfield was to maintain the reserve. Once the reserve was sold to Occidental Petroleum, Bechtel left the area.

National corporations move their employees. We have assigned mentors to students and then had the mentors call and say they were being transferred next month or having to go out of the country for an extended assignment. The HEET Academy now tries to develop mentor clusters with several mentors from one company working with several students. If one employee is transferred, the other mentors have agreed to continue mentoring the student assigned to that employee.

You may begin your academy with 10 business partners that you already know. As your academy grows and you add students, you need to expand your academy business partners to answer needs that you didn't know would exist when you began.

Example: The HEET Academy began with an emphasis on the energy industry because we had contacts in that field. Our only environmental technology contacts initially were with the Bakersfield College program and with the waste management organization. By our second year we had established business partner connections with the Kern County Parks and Recreation department, the Bureau of Land Management, and other environmental groups. The petroleum industry is currently undergoing a cyclical downturn which is impacting the HEET Academy because employees are being laid off and company focus is on survival, not on supporting an academy. The environmental technology business partners are stepping in and providing increased field trip sites, mentors, and service learning opportunities.

Without business partners your academy can't survive. You need to show your companies, your individual partners, the associations that support you, and your local colleges that you value their association with your academy.

Provide opportunities for your business partners to be thanked by the students, staff, parents and school. This can be an end of year celebration, a formal certificate of appreciation, thank you letters from the students following a field trip experience, letters of appreciation sent to employers who have provided employee support, formal commendations to employers from your school board, etc. You need to establish a process by which your business partners will be thanked for every activity that they provide for your academy.

Example: HEET Academy students produce thank you letters in their English academy class after field trips. This is both a writing assignment and a lesson in how you respond appropriately when someone has provided a service for you.

Provide opportunities for your business partners to learn about student success. The goal of your academy is to take at risk students and guid them to graduation and higher education or employment. Your business partners support these goals. Without violating student privacy, devise ways to highlight student improvement in grades, attendance and attitude and share this information with your partners. They want to know that their efforts are producing positive results.

The greatest compliment that you can give to your business partners is to use the information that they provide you.

Value what your business partners recommend, offer in assistance, and report back to you after an activity is completed. They see what is happening in your academy in very different ways than the faculty or administration may view the academy. Sometimes business partners are more positive about an event than the academy faculty is, and sometimes business partners have concerns about what occurred. Value this knowledge and adjust your next activity to reflect those concerns. When business partners see that the school respects their input, they feel a vital part of the academy operation.

Above all, convince your business partners that your academy serves a real need for both the high school students and the industry. And let everyone know that without business partners your academy cannot succeed.