Southern Berkshire Regional School District (SBRSD) has formed a Community Internship Partnership Task Force (CIPTF), which the district calls a big step toward a significant expansion of its internship and early college programs, and a concerted effort to better prepare all graduates for college and 21st-century careers. As SBRSD Superintendent Beth Regulbuto describes it, the effort is seeking to provide students with “wall-to-wall” opportunities in and out of school, so that starting as soon as the next academic year, every one of Mount Everett High School’s approximately 100 juniors and seniors will experience at least one internship at a Berkshire County workplace. They also will have the option to take at least one Early College class, either taught by a Simon’s Rock professor or a Mount Everett teacher certified to teach Early College courses.
According to both Regulbuto and Jane Burke, chairwoman of the SBRSD School Committee, the need for this expanded effort has become clear, as improving graduation rates — in 2021, 92% of Mount Everett seniors graduated — have not been enough to improve life outcomes. Regulbuto said that while “school districts are doing a great job of graduating students now, what’s happening after that? We ask students, ‘Do you feel prepared for college or career? What could we do to make you more ready?’ There’s uncertainty about next steps. ‘Can I afford school?’ … I had a 3rd or 4th grader my first year come down to me: ‘I don’t do college. It’s not something that we think is something I can do when I get older.’… That was really telling. We want to find ways to give kids opportunities, to not feel limited by what possibilities could be in the future. We’ve been finding ways to get more kids out there.”
Burke points to the imperative of schools shifting much of their approach in the digital age, since simply providing information in the form of the standard course material doesn’t cut it anymore. “I’m very excited about what we’re exploring right now,” she said. “We want to give students opportunities out in the community to take more adult roles. We decided years ago that working with the existing resources in the community was the way to go, with the small numbers of students we have.”
The state tracks the graduation plans of students, but does not follow them thereafter, so it is hard to know how many of the 45–60% of Mount Everett grads who report their intention to enroll in four-year colleges each year actually go on to earn a degree.
Early college fits in with the state’s overall innovation aims. The Massachusetts Department of Education first articulated a push for “college and career readiness” in 2013 and has since gone on to tweak what the concept encompasses many times over. College and career readiness involves: enhanced advising and guidance; alignment of curriculum with labor market demands; instruction that integrates the student’s plans and interests; work-based education like internships; earning real world credentials; and expanding post-secondary options in college and other training.
One key to students’ success in life is to identify passions early on, Regulbuto has learned, and to align the time they spend in high school with those interests. This is the larger vision of the new initiative. It’s tempting to work from the opposite direction, identifying first the sectors that need workers and then attempting to slot grads into those available jobs, but not practical. “I know a lot of community members say ‘Well, I need an electrician. I need someone to do my roof.’ But if the child isn’t passionate, they’re not going to go into that. So, we want to give them actual real life experience with people who are doing it.”
This spring, 16 Mount Everett students are being set up with internships, in “dentistry, landscaping, electrician, animal science, public health, and town government,” among other professions. The vision of the task force is for future participants to “almost have a catalogue they can go through.” The CIPTF is at the initial stages of determining such things as roles and responsibilities for student and internship placement site contacts, and who reports to whom. Regulbuto would like to see the task force evolve down the road into more of a public-private coalition of people who together “think about what we can do differently to meet student needs for the future.”
The district is also awaiting news on its application to receive an official Early College designation from the state, which will allow them to deepen their existing work with the local program. As the website of the state program explains, “Early College programs are designed to blend elements of high school and college to provide students with the opportunity to experience and complete college level academic coursework on a clearly articulated pathway and simultaneously gain exposure to a variety of career opportunities. Early College programs also reduce the time and expense of earning a college credential while increasing the likelihood of completion.”
Bard College at Simon’s Rock, in Great Barrington, was the nation’s first private, residential Early College, with students starting their higher education at age 16. In the past two decades, Bard has built up a network of participating urban high schools that implement the Early College model. Since the fall of 2019, Simon’s Rock has partnered with SBRSD to provide courses for students that will get them closer to earning associate degrees while still enrolled in free K-12 public education. Starting with next year’s incoming classes, the task force hopes to expose students in grades 8 and up to Early College planning, giving every student the option to earn an associate degree before graduation. The building blocks for this ambition are already very much in place. “We now have students with as many as 12 college credits when they graduate,” said Regulbuto.
Simon’s Rock Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Associate Dean of Studies for the Sophomore Year and Upper College Ken Knox, the key liaison between the two schools, said the program is “specifically designed to on-ramp students into the idea of going to college, to feel like they belong at college, and to really leave nobody out … The idea is that familiarity is going to help participating first-generation students who have not previously seen themselves as college bound … It’s quite unique, because of the scale we’re attempting to offer. We want to give every single student a chance to experience college coursework at no cost to school or family. The goal is to ultimately raise college completion rates and drive down their costs to attend a two- or four-year institution.”
Chairwoman Burke and Superintendent Regulbuto both see the most important benefit of the CIPTF as giving students time and room to experiment. “One of the things Beth is really adamant about is kids need to try out what they think they like, and then not be discouraged if they find out ‘Well, that’s not what I wanted.’ We want to try to help them not choose something they thought they wanted when they were younger. We all are going to change careers at least five times in today’s world, so they have more information about who they are and what they enjoy doing.”
Interested businesses or other community members can reach out to the task force through their website.
