A career and technical high school concept for New Hanover County earned the support of the county’s board of commissioners Feb. 15, although commissioners had questions about cost and security.
The CTE school would be built on Cape Fear Community College’s north campus in Castle Hayne and serve students from New Hanover and Pender counties. The curriculum would emphasize career readiness with programs blending core classes with internships, job shadowing and project-based learning.
School advisors would help eighth and ninth graders develop a career pathway based on their learning style, aptitude and interests and they would graduate with what NHC Schools Superintendent Dr. Tim Markley described as “a certificate that they can take and turn into employment,” a National Career Readiness Certification.
The school would benefit students, Markley said, increasing graduation rates by offering nontraditional path for students who would thrive in that environment while lessening overcrowding at other local high schools. But it would also boost the county’s economic development by drawing companies in need of specific skills taught in CTE schools.
“Vertex needs welders,” Markley gave as one example, and CTE students would learn skills like welding in CFCC’s lab spaces.
The commissioners supported the concept but questioned various aspects of the plan. Commissioner Woody White pointed out that with an expected enrollment of about between 450 and 500, the $10.9 million estimated price of such a school well exceeded the cost per student of a traditional high school.
He urged those involved to first explore ways to implement the CTE curriculum without building a facility. Later, as the success of the curriculum grows, the construction of a facility could be considered, he said. White’s other cost-minded suggestion was to eliminate redundancy between the CTE curriculum and classes offered in traditional schools.
“See if we’re doing a lot of these things in the school system already, so we can streamline it,” he said.
In response, Markley said the courses to which White was referring were more exploratory, “where students dabble their feet” in the subject matter, but a CTE curriculum would let them become fully immersed. And the cost of the building and maintaining the CTE school would be lower because much of the school would be integrated into the existing CFCC facilities.
That integration could cause security issues, commissioner Rob Zapple said, because CTE students as young as 14 would be sharing a facility with a community college population with an average age of 26.
Markley said that kind of integration is already occurring at UNCW and across the state. The younger students, he added, would be mostly contained within the high school portion of the facility and not until 11th and 12th grade would they start regularly using the shared lab spaces.
Despite their questions and concerns, the commissioners were supportive of the CTE school concept, which vice chairman Jonathan Barfield Jr. said would help not only young people but their families and the community.
“We can put tools in their hands and give them a skill,” he said. “It’s going to provide jobs for them, stability for their families and a lower crime rate for our community.”
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