Start Where You Are

Times Argus: 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.”
New program helps kids explore career and job ideas [Times Argus]