Education summit gives glimpse inside schools

HAYS COUNTY EDUCATION

Innovation is occurring in the Hays County education systems, and area leaders gathered together to inform the public on the ins and outs of what programs are available to local youth. This opportunity was provided by the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce in concert with the Greater San Marcos Partnership during its annual Workforce and Education Summit. The Superintendents of Hays County school districts — Dr. Michael Cardona, San Marcos CISD; Dr. Holly Morris-Kuentz, Dripping Springs ISD; Dr. Greg Bonewald, Wimberley ISD and Dr. Eric Wright, Hays ISD — sat down for a discussion to talk about where the schools are heading and where they’d like to go.

Cardona boasted about San Marcos High School’s 21 Career and Technical Training programs, adding that the district tries to “build programs around our kids and not around the system.” He also discussed some of the partnerships that are allowing San Marcos students to thrive.

“We have a great partnership with Texas State with concurrent enrollment,” Cardona said. “The second part of that is we just had a meeting to expand that conversation to CTE. So we’re potentially looking at having the same opportunity for our CTE kids who may not want to go to college, but we want to put them in that college environ- ment. They might change their minds. They’re going to have to be Texas Success Initiative ready, [which is a test that assesses college readiness]. If they’re not, then we’ll work with our other partners — ACC — we’ll kick around pathways to meet that need. And it happens because you have a leadership team over here that just moves quickly and iterates for our kids.”

Cardona gave examples of some of the CTE programs that have been successful in creating a direct pipeline between the San Marcos education system and its workforce.

“Our EMT program continues to grow,” Cardona said. “Our first kid got hired by the San Marcos Fire Department during our time. Our current Ag teacher is Mr. Nico. He was actually a student at the high school when I started, and now he’s our Ag teacher. It shows that we are growing our own internally.”

Morris Kuentz said Dripping Springs ISD currently has almost 30 CTE programs.

“We had over 170 students this past year, who graduated with … about 230 certifications,” Morris- Kuentz said. “Some of those students were juniors who will continue on in their pathways, but what these certifications have done for them is made them job ready. A lot of them are taking their certifications and actually working in our community.”

Bonewald said Wimberley ISD is much smaller than the others at the event.

“We are about 2700 students, so we’re a little bit smaller than my colleagues here at the table. So we try to offer everything that we possibly can to meet the unique needs and passions of our kids. One of the things we do is look at workforce data, and we look at the interest of our kids to try to design our programs,” Bonewald said. “Right now, our graduating class for this coming year is, I think, 188 students. … Forty- two percent of them are part of what is known as a practicum program. It’s like the capstone course in your senior year, which means that almost half of our graduating class is spending about three hours every other day partnered with some industry — not only in the Wimberley community, but in San Marcos, Dripping Springs, Kyle South Austin and New Braunfels — everywhere from working in doctor’s offices, veterinarians, offices with real estate professionals. So that’s a really exciting part of this.”

Wright said Hays ISD is also looking to expand its programming.

“We start with CTE and our education pathway. And we go to those kids and we tell them, ‘if you’ll stay with us, we’ll immediately sign you as a paraprofessional,’” Wright said. “We have a partnership with Texas Christian University because the tuition is only $250 per credit. So we set aside in our budget to pay for X number of spots, and we give those to our kids first and then they become parents. And then, once they become parents, then we work with them to extend that to become teachers. And so we have our built-in pipeline.”

Looking forward Cardona believes that synergy between the school district, county and city are what is going to move the needle of the San Marcos education system the furthest.

“So goes the school district, so goes the university, so goes the town,” Cardona said. “We need the city to create progressive policies that don’t hinder us [and] the county to do the same thing. We need to be an adaptive ecosystem that moves quickly, and sometimes adults get in the way of kids.”