Focus on Your School
Focus on Your School
The last few years, we have worked collaboratively with Chippewa Valley Technical College (CVTC) to offer more opportunities to our students. We already offered transcripted credit courses, which are taught by our teachers with CVTC’s curriculum and standards.
Students earn college credit for these courses and we have had offerings in math, social studies, business and agriculture.
The next program we worked on, was a welding academy, with our neighboring districts of Cadott, Stanley-Boyd and Gilman. This is a 9 college credit program offered each spring in Cadott, taught by a CVTC instructor.
This program has allowed our students to obtain a basic welding certificate and to graduate from CVTC in a shorter amount of time, with their welding degree.
Last year was an inaugural year for a machine tool academy, taught by a CVTC instructor in Cornell, with eight students. We obtained a large grant to help purchase four new Bridgeport mills and a CNC mill.
This year, three of those students are continuing in a machine tool academy at CVTC in the afternoons and will have their entire first semester of the machine tool program completed, when they graduate from high school.
Last year was also the first for a college transfer academy. This program contains 26 college credits that transfer to all the UW-colleges. Students complete their first year of college while enrolled in high school, which allows them to get their degrees faster and challenges them while in high school.
These courses are taught at CVTC’s Chippewa Falls campus, and we had six students attend there last year, and six more attend this year.
The healthcare academy is a 14-credit program taught at CVTC’s Chippewa Falls campus, which includes medical terminology, general and advanced anatomy and physiology, and a CNA class. Having these pre-requisite courses completed in high school, allows students to immediately be allowed into the medical programs at CVTC, rather than on a waiting list.
We also had a student complete an IT academy on-line and more students are interested in that academy for next year. Academies are beneficial, as they are set up for high school students, but there is still the option of Start College Now, where high school students apply to regular programs at CVTC.
In this case, the students are reviewed for acceptance just like anyone else, but since they are still in high school, they register last for classes, so they may not be able to get all the classes they want.
All these opportunities provide our students a jump start on their post-secondary degrees and get them into the workforce faster. CVTC has been a great partner, that believes in filling the workforce needs of our area and has worked with all of the high schools in the area, to help our students be college and career ready upon graduation.
I encourage you to google “CVTC Academies” and see what CVTC has done to benefit the school districts, employers and most importantly, the students of the area.
