TimesArgus.com - We Are Vermont

New program helps kids explore career and job ideas

While Ben Mahaney, right, holds a poster, Colby LaPerle explains what career paths he is interested in pursuing during a VSAC Start Where You Are presentation at Barre Town School on Wednesday. Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Times Argus

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BARRE TOWN – Ashlyn Barcomb, wearing a jazzy black-and-white T-shirt with her blue jeans, carried a poster illustrated with her own cartoon drawings to the front of the guidance class this week. At the top of her poster was the legend, "What I Might Do."

"I have three major ideas of what I want to do when I get older. The first one is to have a small business – an anime fashion shop," she said, referring to the Japanese art form. She said the shop would carry both the popular books and anime accessories and outfits, "basically all the stuff you'd expect at an anime convention in my store for half the price."

She calculated that the business would give her an income of about $18 an hour, which would work out to more than $37,000 a year.

Her second goal was to become a Gothic-Lolita fashion designer and combine Goth-inspired creations with frills. "My friends said I should do it because I can put together an outfit that no one else can, and it's totally original," she said.

"But, of course my dream job, which I'm totally going to get," she declared, "is I want to be a manga-ka," a designer of Japanese graphic novels.

"The education? I would probably do any classes that I need to brush up my skills on, like backgrounds, and probably take some realistic drawing to brush up on human anatomy," she said. She noted that American mangas aren't very popular yet, but she plans to change that.

Barcomb's eighth-grade classmates at Barre Town Middle and Elementary School have been discussing career ideas, everything from nursing to playing professional basketball to flying a jet. Guidance counselor Ry Hoffman has held class with the eighth-grade students for an hour each week this semester. They talk about the transition to high school, their career interests and courses at Spaulding High School that can help them achieve their goals.

This year, Hoffman has been working with Hannah Hurlburt from the Vermont Student Assistance Corp., using a new program called Start Where You Are. The program is designed to increase the "aspiration rate" for potential first-generation college students – 8th- to 10th-graders who have not been thinking about pursuing training beyond high school, and who are important for filling Vermont's future job needs.

"We're finding that earlier and earlier students are closing doors on themselves in terms of what they want to do," Hurlburt explained. VSAC's 2005 survey of high school seniors revealed that 43 percent of male students had decided in their sophomore year or earlier not to continue their education.

The career awareness program's most notable features are its interactive Web site, with funny, Vermont-y graphics accompanied by quacking, mooing and lapping of waves, and Hurlburt, a.k.a. the "opportunista."

The Web site carries on a "virtual dialogue" with students, asking them questions that help them identify what they like to do and what they're good at. Hoffman says his students play around with the Web site because they find it "user-friendly" and "cool."

Hurlburt travels around the state visiting classrooms and teen centers, and holding actual dialogues with teens and their parents about planning for life beyond high school. Since Start Where You Are was launched in October 2007, she has spoken to more than 4,000 students and put more than 14,500 miles on the program's Honda Element.

As the first member of her Vermont family to go to college, Hurlburt says, "I can completely relate to a lot of what's happening to (students) and what they're trying to decide. My experience was extremely daunting – I ended up being in college for eight years because I didn't plan any of those things in high school, exploring my options then. I can sit there and tell them, and they say, 'Oh, I can relate to this. This makes sense to me. I'm in the same boat.'"

There are many reasons why students discount the idea of getting more education, she said. They may feel they don't have the money, or they may be reluctant to spend it when they're not sure what they want to do, or they may think that their grades aren't good enough. Some don't know what the options are. Others are passive.

And many fail to "connect the dots," Hurlburt said. "The most popular choices – influenced by television – are things like fashion designer and forensic psychologist, but then if they actually look at what that person does and what schooling they need, that's not what they want to do at all. It's just not knowing what they can actually do and what they need to get there."

Hoffman added that even students whose parents went to college aren't sure what steps it takes.

"And the kids that don't have (parents who went to college), especially if they are burnt out from school even in seventh or eighth grade, they're thinking, 'Get out of school as quickly as possible,' but they're not thinking about what they're going to do. Those are the ones I worry about even more so," he said. "They might think they're going to be rock musicians."

Start Where You Are (the remainder of the program's title is Go Where You Want) was created with $1 million in special funding by the Vermont Legislature. The state of Vermont has an urgent interest in equipping these students for the workplace. It's estimated that Vermont will see a 22 percent drop in the number of high school seniors in the next 12 years. To produce the same number of educated workers as today, Vermont must increase the "aspiration rate" of the remaining students from about 72 percent to 90 percent, VSAC data shows.

Scott Giles, VSAC's vice president of policy, research and planning, notes that two or three generations ago, for someone with native intelligence and ability there were many paths out of poverty and into the middle class. Now there's only one – education.

One of the challenges in trying to get young people from low-income families to think about career planning, he said, is that "from our perspective, the universe they're viewing is pretty small.

"When we were having conversations with them about jobs," he said, "the range of jobs they knew existed were defined by what was in their relationship network. But so many jobs in those circles are the ones that are disappearing. The furniture manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Those positions that didn't require education are disappearing most rapidly. That's one of the real challenges to this – to find a way to open their eyes to things outside of that network, to make that meaningful and real to them."

Aslin Trepanier, blue-eyed and poised, said the careers she aspires to are television talk show host, talent agent and fashion buyer. When she finished her presentation, Barcomb asked her, "If you become a fashion buyer, are you interested in buying the outfits I make?"