A dry erase marker squeaks across a white board while a young woman builds out a project plan for the upcoming mixer event, complete with deadlines, tasks and role assignments for her colleagues.
 
But she isn’t a project manager at a Fortune 500 company standing at the front of a conference room.
 
She’s a high school student in futurePREP'd, an initiative of the Ottawa Area Intermediate School District.
 
OAISD has operated its successful career and technical center for almost 40 years, but in 2010, OAISD launched an ambitious and forward-thinking career and technical education program: futurePREP'd.
 
The program was built to assist the local school districts in ensuring all students are prepared to go on to education, training and a career after their K-12 experience through flexible and networked resources and programs.
 
Superintendent Karen McPhee and the OAISD Board of Education selected Jason Pasatta as the development director for career and technical education to champion, develop and implement an initiative that brought to life the vision the community had for career and technical education across the Ottawa area.
 
“The futurePREP'd program has been redesigned to reach more students and at a younger age than traditional career and technical education,” says McPhee. “We believe that all students, not just those lucky enough to attend a tech center, deserve robust career exploration, an understanding of how what they’re learning in their classrooms prepares them for careers and how to purse credentials that lead to careers.”
 
But what makes futurePREP'd different from other CTE programs? At the center of futurePREP'd is a set of seven 21^st century skills, known as the Skills4Success. These skill sets, developed by area business, community and education leaders, cultivate the desirable skills necessary in almost any career.
 
Nicole Gitler, a futurePREP'd facilitator for entrepreneurship and global business, focuses on collaboration, communication, personal accountability and critical thinking with her students.
 
“Students are prepared for the real world because I am constantly having them assess themselves and their peers on how they can get better at these skills,” says Gitler. “Students participate in a variety of job shadows, they complete full portfolios, do mock interviews, participate in team building activities and even teach each other about new concepts to help prepare them for what’s next.”
 
Along with the Skills4Success, the Connections initiative is unique to OAISD. The Connections initiative partners schools with local businesses to prepare students for their future through mentoring and developing work experience starting in sixth grade. Designed to engage students in creating a “work-going” mindset, the program makes the connection between school work and future career goals.
 
The program also has Connections Academy, which is a semester-long program that engages high school students in local businesses. Here, students learn about available career options, work on real-world problems and create a personal plan for success after high school.
 
Home to some of the most innovative and thriving business and industry in the world, West Michigan is a focal point for futurePREP'd.
 
“There is a huge disconnect between the hugely creative and fascinating work that these businesses do locally and the level of knowledge our students have about this,” says Pasatta.
 
With an unemployment rate of 3.6 percent in December, companies are having a tough time finding talent to push their work forward. “If we are going to continue to have thriving and vibrant community into the future, it will be imperative that we nurture and retain our own talent locally.”
 
Connections even features the “We Make It Here” video series, which highlights local employers focusing on specific career paths of local employees, used by middle school teachers in their regular classrooms.
 
Educators also take a unique approach to the program through a series of steps, including learning the basics of project based learning and the Skills4Success, experiencing and practicing these skills with students at an industry site, and developing curriculum for their own classrooms.
 
Instead of lecturing and students simply learning new information, teachers guide their students to solve problems through creative sequences and solutions.
 
“Our programs within futurePREP'd are aimed squarely at assisting our local districts to develop the capacity of their educators to bring business and industry relevance to the curriculum that they teach,” says Pasatta.
 
Three different programs are offered for educators, depending on what level they teach. At Sundae School, educators work with kindergarten through fifth grade students in a local scoop-shop for four days in the summer to develop a new sundae for their particular location. IChallengeUth is for sixth to eighth grade educators, where they work with middle school students at a local business or industry site over one week to solve a real-life challenge. IChallengeU is similar to IChallengeUth, but for ninth to twelfth grade educators and students.  
 
FuturePREP'd also understands the importance of starting CTE at a young age, beginning with Sundae School, a career exploration program for elementary school students, and spanning across all grade levels to programs like IChallengeUth and Connections.
 
“We believe developing a 'work-going' desire and mindset begins as early as elementary school and that all students have interests and passions that, when nurtured, develop into marketable skills,” says McPhee.
 
Roza Barajas, a student of the futurePREP'd program and a senior at Holland High School, has found talents in herself that she never knew existed, such as public speaking.
 
“I learned something very important from this program and that was the steps on how to solve a real life problem with out of the box thinking and putting them into action with a hands-on experience,” says Barajas.
 
“I love to watch a student come in the first day and not know why they are there, what they will be doing and how they should act. It is so rewarding to take them from this place of confusion and anxiety about their future to confidence and excitement,” says Gitler.
 
OAISD’s goal is to ensure that all students go on to some form of post-secondary education by the year 2023. They are well on their way with a vast majority (83 percent, to be exact) currently going on to post-secondary education.
 
“In the future,” says Pasatta, “We would love to see career and technical education more seamlessly woven into the fabric of the education system as opposed to being a separate, stand-alone entity.”