Career & Technical Education: Empowering Students to Create a Life They Love

I was twenty years old and a junior in college. I remember the day I sat in my Fundamentals of Interior Design course and the instructor had invited three guest speakers from the Family & Consumer Science department to share their plans of becoming secondary educators. I was on my way to becoming an interior designer, but the small little presentation caused me to pause and question the path I was on.

Having gone to a private, all-female, Catholic high school, the expectation was that I excel in math, science, and English. It was to prepare myself for college and a professional career. Yet, here I was for the first time, learning about this particular area that combined all of the things I was passionate about - culinary arts, fashion, interior design, and child development. It was the first time I was excited about my future and having a career that I love. I went to my advisor, changed my major, and never looked back. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Luckily, I knew those particular passions existed within myself because they naturally emerged growing up. I would flip through my mother’s Betty Crocker cookbook when I was bored and attempt to bake something, I regularly rearranged my tiny bedroom and made sure the throw pillows looked just right, I had notebooks filled with my own fashion sketches, and at family events I was the one who always had a baby cousin in her arms. 

There are times I asked myself, what if I had been able to explore those areas early on? I took every single art class I could in high school because I needed that creative outlet and it was the only classroom where I felt like I belonged. It was the only place where I felt like I could achieve at my highest level because I enjoyed it. What if I was given a shot at navigating a sewing machine or creating a mood board? What if I could have stepped away from the Betty Crocker cookbook and created my own recipes? Those things were not possible in a college-prep high school. I flew under the radar. 

When considering all of this, it highlights the significance of our career and technical education programs and the vital role they play in shaping our youth for an extraordinary future that they love. As a teacher, when a student came to me and asked me to sign their yearbook, I would typically sign it with “create a life you love.” That is the beauty of CTE, it opens students' eyes to the gifts they may not even know they have and the endless possibilities for a future they love.

At LSR7, our CTE teachers are creating brave spaces for students to explore and achieve. Our classrooms are zones of discovering what could be next. From developing apps to building playhouses, the possibilities become clearer. From cupcake wars to school based enterprises, students are discovering the spaces where they feel like they belong, and isn’t that what matters the most?