Not Your Father’s Shop Class
By Tim Altork and Jamie Woodhead / STAFF
Johnny Goodstudent gets his college applications in early, receives a big pile of acceptance letters in the mail and deliberates for the majority of his senior year on which reputable school he should grace with his presence.
But what about the high school senior that, for whatever reason, has no idea what he is going to do after graduation and doesn’t follow the traditional track? What are the options for Joe Graduator?
First of all, it’s important to note that in North Fulton County there are way more Johnny Goodstudents than there are Joe Graduators. The typical public school in the area graduates between 400 and 450 students each year. Of those students roughly 85 percent will attend either a four-year or two-year college right out of high school.
“I know in this area we have a phenomenal percentage of students who attend 4-year colleges,” says Collyn Alford, who coordinates the College and Career Center at Chattahoochee High School. “There’s a bubble around here that it’s expected, and that is what a majority of students do.”
Another 5-9 percent attend technical schools to learn a specific trade, and an even smaller percentage go straight to the workforce or prepare for it via an apprenticeship of some sort.
Maggie Boone graduated from Roswell High School in 2007 and is now an apprentice at Roswell’s Salon de la Vie in preparation for a career as a hairdresser. She is confident that she was fully capable of going the college route, but it was her personal preference that led her to where she is.
“In high school I took two years of Cosmetology class really just because I needed an extra class,” she said. “I started to enjoy it. Then senior year I was applying for school, and it just didn’t feel right. I was good at school, and I knew I could succeed at college, but I just didn’t really want to go.”
Patrick Cox, the counseling department head at Centennial High School, said that Boone’s story is fairly typical of students who choose something other than a traditional college education.
“They have different interests,” Cox said. “They maybe aren’t at the top of the class, but that doesn’t matter. They’re still good students and they want to get an education, but they just have different interests.”
Most schools offer two different diplomas for graduating seniors. At Centennial there is college prep and career tech. The difference between the two is in the course work. College prep is designed to prepare a student for college, while career tech emphasizes more hands-on classes and skill training. But, particularly in North Fulton, career tech is not reserved strictly for the slackers who are skating their way through school.
And it’s is no longer just a shuffling of students back and forth between shop and home economics (which is now known as Family and Consumer Sciences), a point driven home by the fact that many college prep students opt to get a dual diploma because of the benefit of the courses.
Schools now offer pre-engineering, broadcast video production, criminal justice and business courses, among many others, for the career tech student.
“We emphasize to the parents that a career tech diploma is a level diploma,” Cox said. “It’s not like you have to get college prep or else you can’t go anywhere. You can get a career tech and you can do a lot of things.”
Traditionally there is a stigma associated with students who go the career tech route, but Boone says that it can be very satisfying to ignore the nay-sayers.
“At first, my friends said I was crazy and tried to talk me into going to college,” she said. “But now, they realize that I’m doing what’s right for me, and I’m successful. Now they come into the salon and get their hair done, and they are really impressed. They realize I have everything together.”