It was the third he’d attended, but Kris Hupp said he seems always to get something new out our annual Future Ready Partnerships Conference (FRPC). Among takeaways from this year’s, the Cornell School District Director of Technology & Instructional Innovation said he and two Cornell teachers who accompanied him got some ideas from the “hands on” approach UPMC Health Plan advocated for energizing career fairs.
From some college workshops, he also learned that students starting their post-secondary journeys often don’t feel they have the skills to collaborate and work out problems among themselves, something he’s been hearing lately among Cornell’s students.
This year’s Conference was the fifth we’ve held and the second year we’ve co-hosted the event with Intermediate Unit 1. Like our previous events, it was booked to capacity.
Held at PennWest California on March 5, the Conference was designed to bring educators together with employers to help identify partnership opportunities and make contacts. It drew sponsorships from Comcast, Ford Office Technologies, PNC Bank, Range Resources, and UPMC Health Plan.
In some opening remarks, IU1’s Executive Director, Don Martin, summed up the rationale for the annual event and the Consortium’s role, saying “there needs to be a connector” between employers and schools.
For Jodi Cobb, Transition Coordinator for Big Beaver Falls High School, the Conference filled that need and more. “It brings the businesses to the educators—it was very beneficial,” she said, adding that she came away from breakout sessions “chock-full” of ideas for helping students explore careers and for helping design a high school academy her district plans to launch.
In addition to a panel discussion on best practices for career fairs led by UPMC Health Plan, there were eight other breakouts on topics ranging from high school academies that Community College of Beaver County has launched in partnership with businesses like Mascaro Construction, to apprenticeship programs in education and healthcare.
Following two rounds of breakouts, attendees had a chance to meet with any of 18 businesses and organizations during three rounds of “speed sessions” featuring partnership opportunities and other resources for educators and students. Session hosts were as various as Range Resources, which offers STEAM and workforce development programming to schools in partnership with Intermediate Unit 1, and the German American Chamber of Commerce, which connects schools and their students to pre-apprenticeships and apprenticeships it has developed in collaboration with German companies.
