A new push for a better workforce

I was invited to join what organizers called a Career Pathways/STEM Educator-Employer Summit Nov. 11 at the BAE Systems facility in West Manchester Township. That's a fancy way of saying more than two dozen representatives from county schools and employers met to brainstorm ways to improve the way students are prepared for York County jobs in a 21st-century economy. The emphasis here was on finding ways to improve math and science skills for students across the county, specifically with an eye on future high-tech manufacturing jobs. Participants also wanted to develop new ways for schools and local employers to interact.

These were the questions posed by organizers Glenn Caufman and Rob McIlvaine:
1. For educators, what's the school's role in preparing students for the new economy, and what barriers do you face?
2. For employers, what are your expectations of graduates entering the workforce, and what role should employers play in helping schools shape curricula to meet those expectations?
3. For educators, how would partnerships between schools and employers enhance student performance?
4. For employers, is it in your self interest to develop relationships with local schools?
5. For both groups, what should a collaborative partnership between schools and businesses look like and what are some current best practices in the school-to-work arena?

Caufman, director of the York County Alliance for Learning, and Rob McIlvaine, from Mantec, sent out a recap of the brainstorming session, and there were dozens of ideas generated by the questions. The challenge now will be to turn all the ideas into a workable plan.

YorkCounts supports this effort. Developing better connections between employers and workers was a Metro-York recommendation in 2007, and that task has been taken up initially by the York County Economic Development Corp., which developed its Office of Workforce Development. EDC President Darrell Auterson provided the welcome at the summit, a sign that this new effort will tie into the work that Auterson's group is doing.

Lots of York County students still view college as their first option after graduating. But for those that don't, how well are schools doing to prepare kids for the quality jobs that exist right here? What could schools and employers be doing differently to reduce brain drain?

- Dan Fink

Truancy effort aims for grant

An article in the Nov. 19 York Daily Record reports that the York County commissioners applied for a $75,000 state grant that would pay for an anti-truancy specialist for York County. This is great news for the fight to reduce truancy and dropout rates. The United Way of York County recently made public the YorkCounts-United Way Stay in School Report, and one of the recommendations in the report is to expand the work of Judge John Uhler's truancy prevention task force. A key part of that would involve hiring a full-time coordinator. It sounds like this grant would be a big step in that direction.

- Dan Fink

Who needs hip to grow? Not York

What really matters to the City of York’s socioeconomic sustainability? This piece from Joel Kotkin is worth contemplating. While I don’t always agree with Kotkin, his work is rock solid – he’s a serious academic, not a shoot-from-the-hip booster or ideologue.


He makes two main points. First:

"The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently identified the "Next Youth-Magnet Cities" as drawn from the old "hip and cool" collection of yore: Seattle, Portland, Washington, New York and Austin, Texas.
It's not just the young who will flock to the blue meccas, but money and business as well, according to the narrative. The future, the Atlantic assured its readers, did not belong to the rubes in the suburbs or Sun Belt, but to high-density, high-end places like New York, San Francisco and Boston.
This narrative, which has not changed much over the past decade, is misleading and largely misstated. Net migration, both before and after the Great Recession, according to analysis by the Praxis Strategy Group, has continued to be strongest to the predominately red states of the South and Intermountain West."

And second:

More important, the key group leaving New York and other so-called "youth-magnets" comprises the middle class, particularly families, critical to any long-term urban revival.

I think there is good news and bad news for a place like York in Kotkin's essay. The bad news is that we happen to find our city trapped in a state with seemingly intractable systems that work against the success of older communities, and that, as a whole, is a “donor” to the migration patterns he describes. The good news is that we probably don’t need to spend so much time beating ourselves up that we’re not Austin or Portland – that we’re not hip enough to attract the ballyhooed “creative class” – and focus on the message that for plenty of families, value and jobs matter more than hip coffee shops and jazz clubs. I’m not arguing against those things – they are a proper part of creating a downtown “Market District” that offers the quality of life that is needed to attract a certain segment of the population, and they are good for our downtown. But let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture either.

At the end of the day, York County has a couple of things going for it that are as much good fortune as they are clever economic development:

1. A great location on the edge of the Northeast Corridor, with excellent transportation access to some of the wealthiest markets in the world.
2. Relatively inexpensive land and a lower cost-of-living than is found in those markets.

With those two factors as the backdrop, the City of York has a couple of things going for it:

1. An absolutely fantastic built environment with a downtown and neighborhoods that bear all the attributes of a great urban place.
2. A shifting demographic, cultural and energy-cost climate (that will last probably 30 years) that will be far more favorable to walkable, urban places than the last 30 years have been.

It’s our job to stop apologizing for ourselves and our city (and our schools, and our taxes, and our crime) and take advantage of the above factors with an economic- and community-development strategy that looks at how to change the game based on where the market is headed. Let’s make ourselves a great urban place and let the other chips fall where they may. Today would be a good opportunity to start.

- Eric Menzer, YorkCounts chairman of the board

Survey to bring vital data on youth

From today's York Dispatch:

York County students are being surveyed through Nov. 13 to gather data about their behavior, their attitudes and their knowledge about alcohol, tobacco, drugs and violence.
The Pennsylvania Youth Survey will be administered to students in sixth, eighth, 10th and 12th grades in 15 of the county's 16 school districts and several charter schools.

The article says this will be the first time so many York County schools will participate in the survey. Why is that important? More students responding means more and better data, and that will help local officials better identify issues, assess programs and target spending needs.

In the bigger picture, this is a key part of the effort to reduce gang violence and youth crime and the related issues of truancy and school dropout rates. YorkCounts will hold a series of town halls on that very subject, starting with the first event in Dover on Nov. 9. The town halls, "Kids, Truancy and a County at Risk," will focus on the YorkCounts-United Way's Stay in School Report.

- Dan Fink

For the poor, community colleges are crucial

A news release Oct. 20 from the Pew Charitable Trusts highlighted a report that shows the importance of community colleges in a job market that demands lifelong learning. From the release:

"Earning a community college degree boosts earnings by an average of $7,900 annually, an increase of 29 percent over those with only a high school diploma.
For low-income, high-achieving high school students in particular, community colleges serve as a springboard to further postsecondary education; more than half eventually transfer to four-year programs, and three-quarters of those who transfer earn a bachelor’s degree."

That just underscores our belief here at YorkCounts on the role that HACC can play in helping students from low-income families break out of poverty, and in making sure York County has a well-trained workforce.

And we know HACC takes that role seriously. Over the summer, I attended a workshop at HACC where officials from various organizations spent a morning basically brainstorming ways to improve the college-readiness of high school students in York. From that session, Lise Levin, community development director at HACC's York campus, has started a list of things HACC wants to try. The ideas range from in-service days at HACC for teachers to class-sampling opportunities for high school students.

What ideas do you have for helping city students be more prepared for college?

- Dan Fink

Judge Uhler talks truancy on WITF

York County Judge John Uhler talks about truancy and the toll it takes on our community on WITF-FM's "Radio Smart Talk" this morning. His truancy work will be part of an upcoming series of town halls planned by YorkCounts. The first town hall is 6:30 p.m. Nov. 9 in Dover. Here's the program summary from witf.org:

"More than one million students drop out of school each year in the U.S. Statistics indicate that a college graduate will earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more in their lifetime than a high school drop out.

As these figures suggest, education is one of the keys to earning a sustainable living that will provide for a family.

So why do so many still leave school or not see education as important to their
futures? How do keep these kids in school and prepare them for the workforce after they've graduated?"

- Dan Fink

Sprawl is bad

I've been at two very different events recently. One was a gathering of grassroots organizations and community activists, representing poor communities with high minority populations. The other was a gathering of municipal decision makers, representing the conservative, tradition-bound folks of Lancaster County.

Both groups heard the same message: Sprawl is bad.

Sprawl creates unsustainable, environmentally wasteful development. It adds to the burden on government by demanding wave after wave of government support for new sewer and water infrastructure and new roads, more fire and police resources and more schools. It forces people to work farther and farther away from their homes. And it segregates middle- and upper-income residents from lower-income residents.

The thousands of suburbs that have popped up across the country since the 1950s were built with government-subsidized highways, cheap gas and consumers with money to spend on their houses. Guess what: Governments are out of money, gas isn't cheap and consumers don't have money, if they even have a house.

Which is why Christopher Leinberger says "Sprawl is the root cause of the financial crisis."

Fixing the economy, for the long term, means ending this perpetual push to the 'burbs. It means less money for highways, more for mass transit. It means investing in cities, older first-ring suburbs and other walkable communities. It means building new developments close to existing communities and not in some out-of-the-way cornfield. It means having municipalities incentivize high-density and mixed-housing requirements for new communities, and it means builders and developers figuring out how to do that and still make money.

In other places, community leaders are learning the lesson that sprawl is bad. The same thinking will help York County, too.

- Dan Fink