Jackson Area Career Center: The Whole Town’s Talking
The Jackson Area Career Center (JACC) is operated by the Jackson Country Intermediate School District and offers a wide variety of courses for students from over 20 high schools in Jackson, Hillsdale, and Calhoun counties. This past school year was the first year that the JACC offered Project Lead the Way (PLTW) pre-engineering courses at their facility.
While PLTW is just starting in the Jackson area, it’s also expanding quickly. In September, six of the area’s high schools, Columbia Central, Grass Lake, Hanover-Horton, Western, Northwest, and Michigan Central, will all offer at least one PLTW course at their own sites. Meanwhile, the JACC will continue to offer the complete range of introductory and advanced level courses for the entire region. The area’s middle schools are serviced by two JACC instructors who visit the middle schools and teach the courses there.
Ryan Linderman (left) and Marcus Beal (right) with their mechanical marble sorter.
Denise Belt, the JACC’s Career Technical Education Curriculum Supervisor, said, "The amount of interest PLTW is creating in our county is amazing. We have an advisory committee for PLTW. Talk about a community project. We have engineers on our advisory committee. The Jackson Area Manufacturing Association, a big leader in manufacturing for the county, is very involved with us. We have teachers and principals from around the county working together with business and industry to provide this opportunity for students."
Ed Redies, who teaches PLTW courses at the JACC, said, "I designed metal cutting tools for over 20 years and I found in PLTW all the things that I personally used at one time or another in the design process.” Mr. Redies feels students are aided by an early exposure to engineering. He said, “There are a lot of kids in high schools who are good at math and science. They talk to a counselor about what to do with their lives and they’re told to consider engineering. But they don’t have a clue what an engineer does. Why not find out at this level before spending thousands to find out in college? Even if they don’t like it, they’ve found they don’t like it and that has value in itself."
Nick Kotsch beside the SMET machine he helped build.
After two terms of Mr. Redies’ intensive course work, students know what to expect in the career beyond. Mr. Redies’ students have to design and build a mechanical marble sorter (a project which takes six weeks to complete), design and build a “SMET machine” (which combines smaller simple machines into a larger, more elaborate whole), design and build a bridge (made of balsa wood), and work on the lathe in the machine shop making pieces of brass and aluminum. Mr. Redies’ students also learn about electricity and kinematics, write a 20-page report, and do computer-assisted drafting (CAD) with the Inventor computer program.
If it sounds like a lot of work, Mr. Redies’ students don’t seem to mind. Marcus Beal, a student from Columbia Central High School, said of PLTW, “If you are a hands-on person, this is where it’s at.” Although the mechanical marble sorter took six weeks to design and build, Devon Stone, a student from Grass Lake High School, said, “I thought it was the best part of the class.” Another Columbia Central student, Nick Kotsch, said, “This class was really fun. I’m a visual person and I absorbed the PowerPoint lectures really well. When we were going into a new concept, like a math concept, we had an overview of it that was really helpful.” The class projects brought out Nick’s competitive spirit. He said, “I’d be at home thinking about what I could do to make a project work better and outsmart the rest of the class.”
While engaged in the present, the students also understand what PLTW means for their future. Ryan Benn will take electrical engineering at Western Michigan University in the fall. He said that PLTW," is giving me a lot of extra tools to prepare me for what I'll be doing in college." Ryan Linderman plans to enter the University Of Michigan College Of Engineering. He said that PLTW, "will give me some experience before I go to college and give me an edge once I get there." Ryan also said that PLTW, "opens up another opportunity to use what you know."
Ryan Benn helped build the SMET machine as well.
Summing up the benefits PLTW offers JACC’s students, Ms. Belt said, “With high school reforms in Michigan, there are a lot of new requirements for students: four years of math, three years of science. And we always hear from students, ‘How am I ever going to use this? Why is this important?’ PLTW offers engineering, architecture, construction, biotech, aeronautics, and manufacturing. With PLTW, students get to pull their math, science, and technology together in a way that reaches their interests, that gives them career options for when they leave school, and that adds relevance and meaning to their studies.”