The plumbing and pipefitting classroom at Cranston High School East is equipped with a makeshift two-story home, perfect for learning to install toilets and showers. The equipment for cutting and shaping pipes was purchased to align with pipefitting standards at Electric Boat, where Luis Camacho worked over the summer.
“If I was looking back when I was young, I would never have expected it,” Camacho, a senior at the high school, told The Boston Globe and Rhode Island PBS during a recent visit to the school. “I never knew I was going to go into plumbing.”
The program is among nearly two dozen Career & Technical Education (CTE) offerings in Cranston’s public school district, which has been rapidly expanding programs in high-demand, well-paying industries like engineering, life sciences, and graphic design. The number of programs in Rhode Island has ballooned to more than 280 this year and participation has more than doubled since the 2017-2018 school year, with more than 20,000 students participating — nearly half of public high school students statewide. Some of the programs are precursors to college, while others allow students to go straight into a career after graduation.
A few miles across town, a group of students at Cranston High School West tend to mollusks and crustaceans in a massive wet lab filled with dozens of fish tanks and ponds.
The offerings across Rhode Island are broad: you can learn to build boats in Warwick, become a firefighter in Providence, study early childhood education in Smithfield, and pursue broadcast journalism in Lincoln.
“Vocational education was really focused on specific technical skills,” said Bill Bryan, the chair of Rhode Island’s CTE Board of Trustees. “Career and technical education is very different. Career and technical education is intended to provide students a competitive advantage.”
In other words: this is not your grandfather’s vo-tech.
There are still traditional vocational high schools across New England, and Rhode Island has long had standalone career and tech centers. But in recent years, Rhode Island districts have been expanding programming within traditional high schools, allowing more students to sign up without switching schools.
“It has been a very dramatic change,” Bryan said
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