Hillsboro School District's Work Experience Journey

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Hillsboro School District’s Work Experience Journey 1. Location, location, location. Prior to our current location, our offices were located at Administration center. Fortunately, Jennii’s cubicle was nearby Nutrition Services. The Nutrition Services director could see and hear us interact with students. She became interested, saw the vision, and was instrumental in helping us start a network of work experience placements within our district’s school kitchen cafeterias. 2. Our Employment Event helps us to cultivate relationships. We gain support from our business community by sponsoring a Mock Interview Employment Event annually, to provide opportunities for students from our high schools to practice their interviewing skills and get feedback. Local businesses have expressed their appreciation and it helps us to market our program. We ask them how to better train future workers and that informs our instruction and training with our YTP students. They learn about us and what we do. They see how capable our students are and usually say, “I wish I’d had the help when I was their age.” 3. We build relationships. We seek out the nutrition and custodial staff in the buildings and nurture relationships with them – We think of tasks that our students could do, but things that won’t take away someone else’s job. We develop relationships with our applications department and the Washington County Jail because our volunteers need to be fingerprinted and have a background check. 4. We have district administrative support. Several years ago our Student Services Executive Director arranged for a meeting with the various directors in our district (Nutrition Services, Facilities, Transportation, etc.) to help us expand our work experience sites and create a program that provides scaffolding opportunities. 5. We work at sustaining relationships. Our Nutrition Services Director recently retired, so we are in the process of establishing a new relationship with her replacement, to keep the vision. We do this by: a. Asking, what can we do for you? How can we help you? b. Telling the stories of successful students back to the staff who have helped them. When students get paid employment, we share the success with the folks who helped them to get there. c. Last spring we sponsored an Open House to thank our staff who provided our students with work experience sites. We shared our success stories with them. 6. We keep up with Labor Laws so that we are in compliance – 120 hours 7. We build our work experience sites to allow for scaffolding of skills. 8. We build community relationships. In our small community, people in the schools have relationships with people in the community. Nutrition services worker knows a local Goodwill manager, etc.