(upbeat music) Hello, Alabama.

I'm Dr. Eric Mackey, State Superintendent of Education.

In Alabama, we recognize career and technical education around 16 career clusters.

These are pathways where our students get hands-on experience and instruction in the field of study to become experts.

These pathways include industries like agriculture, marketing, business, finance, arts and communication, and the military.

Last year, we highlighted eight of the career clusters.

You can find that video at alabamactso.org.

This year, we're covering the remaining eight clusters.

In the next half hour, we will aim to highlight students, teachers, and administrators from around the state who are taking exceptional and ordinary measures to further our students' education.

The goal is every child, every chance, every day.

It is our hope to reach every student and prepare them for what is next.

(upbeat music) We are here at Morgan County School's Technology Park where we have a active pre-K here on campus.

If you wanna get in the program, then you have to put your kid's name on the list the day they're born.

If you don't get on the list the day they're born, they won't get in because the waiting list is that long.

This program was in place 50 years ago when the school was built.

This room was set up just like it is now.

It was called childcare.

People still call it childcare.

We're not childcare, we're a preschool program.

My students are being trained to prepare preschoolers for kindergarten.

We can take 16 preschoolers.

This year I have 17 because I have a set of twins.

Everyone's coming in, everyone's so excited.

They got all this energy pent up.

We have like reading, most of the time they don't do that.

They love the blocks.

The blocks is like their favorite part and the trucks, and the home living, the dress up, they love it, and then they're just really addressing everyone in the room, they're screaming, they miss all their friends for a three day weekend, so yeah, they're just living life.

[Cynthia] We never have to leave our room if we do not have to.

Students come in and out all day, but our preschoolers never leave.

We may leave to go to the gym, go to the playground, and that's it.

This is my favorite class and on Thursdays I'm in here basically all day because of our block schedule, and it's just so fun getting to see the kids.

I like coming in and I like seeing how excited the children are to see me and I like being able to do lessons for them and help them eat and just, I like being there for them.

They plan the lessons, they prepare the lessons.

I tell them what they need to teach from, such as a theme, what content area, math, science, language arts, and then they have to prepare something to go with that.

With the lesson plans that I do, I love doing like hands-on.

Like, I had a lesson plan about ice and we filled up ice trays and put them in the freezer, and then when they froze, we put them in a bowl and we watched them like melt and they were like ecstatic, like they loved it.

They thought it was so cute and funny that it was melting and it was so cold in their hands.

Like, I can never have a bad day if I'm in here with these kids.

Like, they're just amazing.

It's one of the most sought after preschools in our county.

Like I said, where people come from miles away just to get their kids in this preschool.

Personally, I had two of my three kids came through the program here.

We offer a CDA program, which is a Child Development Associate.

It's very hard, rigorous.

They have to have 480 hours working with preschoolers.

At the end of their high school years, they can pass this test and walk into a preschool classroom anywhere in the nation as an aide, just like an associate's degree.

I'm grateful for this program because it provides me many opportunities for the future and it just helps me have more experience for my future job.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) We are at Demopolis High School and we're focusing on the business cluster.

In this program, students get the opportunity to apply their business ideas into the technology world.

This classroom is so hands-on.

Everything that we're doing, we're getting to see in person what we're doing and every time I code something online, I'm not seeing it pop up on a screen.

I can see it moving through the robot, I can see it moving through another drone, something like that.

Through the Demopolis City School Foundation, we were able to have a grant for the low-code try drones.

Students get the opportunity to build a drone, go through the curriculum and code the drones, and then they can actually set for their FAA pilot's license when they're 18 years old.

I really think it's really cool that like students have the opportunity to get your license, because like it just puts you like a step ahead.

Like, if you wanna go into that specific field, then you don't have to go through like all the hours of training.

You already have that right outta high school.

In our area, we have agriculture, we have the paper mill, and we think what can we do to set our students up for success?

What is something different that we can do to provide for our students?

We thought that this would be a really great idea because this business is growing and we are a business program in a world that is so focused on technology, I hope to be a drone pilot.

I just think it's like so cool to be like, if you're like shooting a movie and you need like an aerial shot of like a car, I think that's really cool.

Like, it's really fascinating.

I think I'm more interested in the process.

I hope to get my drone license one day so that I can work more on drones.

I like the idea of filming from high above.

I'd like to get into filming.

I'd also like to be able to code drones and see what all I could do with them.

[Kelly] I like for them to fail forward and that it's okay, that it's okay to make mistakes on this, because not every student codes things the same way.

Not all students build things the same way.

We can still get to the final product by taking different approaches.

So success to me is when I sit across the table from a student and we're mapping out what their future's going to look like, the first question I will always ask is, how are you going to pay your bills when you're 25 years old?

What does it look like when you go to work?

And then we create a plan, and that plan is going to have dual enrollment opportunities embedded.

It's going to have credentialing opportunities, it's going to have workforce development in the way of co-op opportunities.

And then that all translates into a future where that 25-year-old comes back to me and says, "Look what I did."

(upbeat music) Hi, my name is Mia Bell and welcome to RDTV.

RDTV stands for Red Devil Television and it's our school news program.

In this program, students have the opportunity to be on all sides of the house.

Some of 'em are in front of the camera, some behind, they do editing, they do sound.

We let 'em get a taste of all of it.

So I got involved in RDTV when Mr. Norman asked me to come be our producer for most of our broadcasting sports.

Coming to this class, I look forward to it every day, especially during football season because we're constantly planning the whole entire week for the broadcast.

We get everything ready, we have everything.

We actually use a production trailer that travels with us when we go to like away games and even at home games.

We created two sides of the house for this program specifically.

We're standing in the traditional classroom side of the house.

We have our iMac computer lab.

You start on this side of the house, typically, learning your craft, but the other side of the house is our studio.

We have a green screen over there.

We have an anchors desk.

We are the Red Devils, so we put out a weekly broadcast called RDTV.

We do news about school sports, activities, clubs, what's going on around the school.

It's really fun to show our student life.

I've gotten so much better, I've learned so much, and I really do surprise myself with my work sometimes, 'cause I'm like, wow, I've grown so much and I've gotten really good.

To come in here on a daily basis and see the energy, to see the excitement that these students have when they are filming and editing a segment that originated in their brain.

It wasn't something their teachers said, "Hey, do this specific thing."

They came up with a concept, they went and recorded it, they edited, they made it happen.

They have ownership in what they're doing in this class and in this program, and I don't know if you're picking it up on the mic, but you can hear the sound, the excitement, it's that way on a daily basis.

[Student] I've always loved watching sports.

When I was a kid, I was watching sports instead of like cartoons and stuff because my family's a big sports family.

But when I got behind the scenes and I started to learn about the broadcast side, I learned that that's what I wanted to do.

[Jason] Success in education is when these students come in, they're learning the software, they're getting the industry-based certifications that are gonna make them more marketable for either a college career, or they could possibly leave here and go work straight in industry.

We are so blessed here at Central to be able to have all of this equipment and to be mentored by Mr. Norman because he really does know so much about this field and it's just really cool to already have this type of experience.

And even talking to colleges, they admire the type of experience that we're getting to receive in high school.

(gentle music) We are at Austin High School and we are talking about our CTE Finance Lab, which is our Redstone Federal Credit Union.

Our Redstone Federal Credit Union branch here at Austin High School is an actual fully functioning branch run by our students.

I am the student teller supervisor.

We do cash transactions with deposits, withdrawals, check cashing, currency exchanges, loan payments.

We're a fully functioning, on a smaller scale, credit union branch.

Oh, I look forward to it every day.

It's honestly the highlight of my day during my A day, whenever I get to come here and I get to put on a smile and just greet people and talk to people.

We start around second blockers around 10 o'clock.

So we get here, we'll put on our uniforms, which is just mainly our Polos and some jeans and we will go and sign into the computers and everything and get our box and go and just get set up and then people and students will come in here and they'll just make your normal transactions that you would at a bank.

Because you wanna have trust with the customers and make sure you build that trust that they know that they can come in and get whatever they need and you're not gonna spread with how much they have or where they live or any of their personal information.

Our idea is to give back to the communities that we serve and we want to give kids the opportunity to have a behind the scenes look at what goes on inside of a financial institution, and at the very minimum teach them skills that will help them in life no matter what career path they decide to take.

Really, the main thing we learn here is professionalism, but we also learn about money management, financial literacy, things that you would learn working as a teller anywhere, like if you were a teller at a bank or a credit union here in Decatur, this is the same thing you learn here.

It's cool because you can come in, let's say we have a basketball game and you need to buy a ticket.

You can just come here and get the money that you need, or you can make an account when someone's here to make an account.

[Ethan] It helps because I'm planning on going into sports marketing and that's money.

That's money, it's money, money, money.

So it's helping me A, with professionalism that comes with that and B, helping learn the money management side.

Our students, once they finish high school with our program, they can go on to work in one of the colleges, Calhoun, A&M, UAH as a Redstone employee and get paid.

I've also had students who didn't plan on going straight to work from high school, but once they finished our program, they went to work full time for Redstone, full benefits, retirement, medical insurance, making a great salary.

(gentle music) Here at Rehobeth High, we have a lot of different programs that students can go in.

They can do construction, they can do landscaping, they can learn welding.

We have a full farm at Rehobeth where students learn how to plant vegetables, strawberries, tomatoes, peppers.

So we have a variety of different types of programs Behind me, it might look like a mud field, but this is actually where we plant and harvest our crops.

We have a six acre farm.

And they are planting potatoes, and so those potatoes will be harvested probably end of April, 1st of May.

[Madison] We plant and harvest crops to donate to local churches, homeless shelters, and everything around our community.

It's so rewarding when we plant something out here and you get to watch it grow and then you harvest it back.

It's so rewarding, and then it's even better when we donate it because you know it's going to something good.

In addition to growing produce for homeless communities, they're going to be growing peanuts for scientific research.

We are going to take tissue from the peanuts and then we are just going to essentially grind it up into these small little pieces until the DNA comes out and try to pick out variants and traits that are good for these peanuts.

We wanna make a peanut seed that's more drought resistant, that is more disease resistance, and that can be more plentiful and bountiful for our farmers.

It's honestly a program that you would only get in higher education, I feel like, and so to bring it down to high school students, it's a great opportunity for them.

So we're really excited about our partnership we have with Hudson Alpha, our students are gonna be engaging in researching different varieties of peanuts.

I know that my students may not all go into something that's ag related when they leave here, but if I can teach them to appreciate ag and to always try and in some way, shape, or form, every time they sit down to eat a meal, appreciate it, and understand how fortunate we are, then for me it's a win.

They've helped me grow my faith, my confidence in ag, my confidence in myself.

It's just like a little class where you get to be yourself and nobody's gonna judge you 'cause there's all different types of people.

You learn and appreciation for ag, you learn an appreciation for yourself, you learn how to work.

Work ethic is a big thing that they teach.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) The JRTC program is a program that's designed to make students better citizens.

This program in general is associated with so many careers.

Obviously there's the military, whether it's Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard, but you can also go into any area that an individual desire.

Our program focuses not only on the military, which a lot of people make that assumption, but it also focuses on, we have those soft skills that can take you into the business world, the medical field, carpentry, welding.

No matter where you go, people are looking for those values that companies possess as far as loyalty, duty, respect.

All organizations look for that, and that's what you can take away into the workforce from JRTC.

JRTC is unique to me because it really instills a sense of leadership that no other class I have has ever really done.

It really has grown my confidence.

It's really made me more confident in everything that I do.

We're able to provide students the opportunity to learn about careers before they graduate high school.

We're also able to provide them with internships and exploration activities that allow them to explore what they're interested in before they graduate and they go spend a lot of time and money and invest in a career that they realize that's not the best fit for them.

This program has helped me grow as an individual because it exposes me to things that I probably would have never experienced in life if it wasn't for JRTC in the CTE program.

Since I was a freshman, I was shy and quiet, and now I feel like this program has made me grow to a person who is more outstanding and more outgoing so I can do a lot more things than I did before.

JRTC, we have students that need IEPs, they may be special needs students, up to those students that are gonna graduate as a valedictorian, salutatorian from their respective schools.

With that group, the disciplines that we teach them give them opportunities that often put them ahead of their peers, again, because they're able to communicate, they're able to lead, they're able to make decisions, they understand financial management, they understand health, and those types of things.

It's the whole package.

This job is a privilege.

Teaching is a privilege.

Parents give us their sons and daughters and expect us to lead them, to guide them, to build relationships with 'em and to love these children, and I'm very serious about that and feel that, and I've loved this job for the last 20 years.

(upbeat music) We are at Cullman High School and we are in the informational technology cluster, highlighting our computer science pathway.

IT is so important, it's just part of our lives now.

It's important for just your everyday life, just for privacy concerns, just protecting yourself, and knowing how to troubleshoot.

I never realized that I use a computer every day, especially with school, but I never realized all of the code that went behind just a simple Google search, or much less an app.

I have so many apps on my phone and to know that someone had to code all of that to work properly gives me a whole new respect for social media and everyday apps that I use.

This is definitely one of my favorite classes.

This is a very exciting class, I would say, 'cause not only do I have like a great teacher, but I have some of my greatest friends in here.

[Olivia] I took AP Computer Science because I wanted to learn how to code and I think that it's very important to be educated on computers, especially in this day and age.

So right now I'm making a What Shoe Would You Buy App.

I really don't have a name for it, but basically, I'm using what shoe size you are, how active are you, and what's your gender?

And then it basically gives you a recommendation of what shoe you should buy.

It's not about what students learn, it's how they learn.

So problem-based learning is very important in our computer science classroom.

When we walk into a computer science class, I expect to see students working with their hands, problem solving, collaborating, having discussions, and all around the concept of coding and making things better for our future.

[Ramses] I like problem solving.

I like receiving a code that's not well fixed and then going in and fixing it, basically.

I have several students now to hear back from them, "I've got a job with Amazon."

They're getting a job as a software engineer, and of course I'll ask 'em, I'll say, well, what did you start out?

You know they're in six figure starting out, so to have that come outta my classroom when you think, hey, when they first came in here, they really had no confidence, but they were willing to listen and try.

That's the most rewarding.

The world is turning 100% digital and I can see my kids going one day to a digital school rather than an in-person school.

A lot of my schoolwork now is already digitally, so having the knowledge of computers and the things that go into computers behind just a Google search is really important to know.

(gentle music) All right, we are here at Hoover High School, focusing on the marketing cluster.

We are so excited to share our school store called the Buck Stop, a gold certified DECA SBE, and to talk about our amazing marketing program.

Marketing is important because it helps you understand people's behavior and what you might need to do in order to sell your product or make your product more worth buying.

Marketing is going to help me in my course of study because it literally teaches you all the basic fundamentals of business.

The Buck Stop is our gold certified DECA SBE that sells apparel, electronics.

We started selling snacks this year.

We sell school supplies, and we also sell novels for teachers who require them for some of their classes.

I've been working here for about a year almost, and it's been very exciting and fun to be here.

This has helped me a lot already because I have already learned a lot from being in retail and I have gotten multiple jobs just because of this job.

And in the future it will help me because I can interact with customers more easily and I've also learned a lot of ways to work a cash register and all kinds of like software components and all of our machinery.

I love seeing students really just get more confident in their leadership.

Some students who work in the store have never worked before and seeing them gain retail experience, leadership experience, the ability to work with us, teachers, adults, seeing that has been very rewarding.

And also they get the opportunity to write this huge proposal that goes to international DECA to certify our school store.

And so seeing them work through that process for a semester and then be rewarded with certification that next semester is incredibly rewarding for we teachers.

I like coming here because it's a way to just like talk to more people and I've met so many people through just the Buck Stop because they come here in need of something and I just make a new friend every day.

[Trey] So other than the physical store behind me, we have a vending machine and in that vending machine, they have things like lotion, hand sanitizer, chargers, toothbrushes, anything that you might need throughout the day.

This experience has been amazing for students.

It gives them in-school work experience.

It gives them the opportunity to basically build their retail experience.

It gives them the opportunity to gain leadership skills, and we also have a small team of students who write our certification paper for DECA certification.

(gentle music) We're out here to highlight our ag program, and the ag program at Alma Bryant is very critical to the community here because this area is mainly built around seafood industry.

Our aquaculture program, we do not only crawfish at the school with hydroponics, so again looking into sustainable agriculture, but now we're doing the oysters.

We have the boat parked, trailered up at the school, and so they will get all the supplies we need for the day, typically oyster baskets, and they will load 'em up in the boat.

We will bring the boat down to the Viola Battery City Docks and launch the boat.

So when we get there, we're going to pull up and you're gonna see a bunch of, you'll see pylons right now and it's essentially, you'll have lines of baskets, and you'll have pylons sticking up to where these rows and lines of baskets, those oyster baskets will be hanging full of our oysters.

Depending on what side we're at, we'll dump 'em out into baskets.

We will hand search through 'em, and then if the basket is too full, we'll separate into multiple baskets and we'll put 'em back on the line.

The program started about 10 years ago due to some of the damages that we've had from past hurricanes.

Even BP oil spill really took a major toll on our oyster industry, so the local oystermen tried to figure out a way to continue the production of the oysters.

They discovered a new technique of oystering.

It's called oyster farming.

[Charles] The idea is that when they take our class, when they finish, they know everything that it takes to be an oyster farmer and so they could theoretically go and start up their own farm if they wanted to.

It's peaceful, it's beautiful every day.

It's like my office.

I like coming out here.

I get school credit, I get to learn more about it.

It's a learning process too, while I'm out here having fun.

[Mason] When I look towards it, I look and I don't even think of it as school.

I think of it as like a career opportunity.

[David] Our students can not only just go be workforce, but they can go be a marine biologist to actually learn how to study oysters and the growth, and then work for the Conservation Department or Marine Resources one day.

Every day you come as an educator and you want to inspire kids to be stewards of their environment.

Down here, we're very blessed with an amazing ecosystem, and so we're trying to inspire students to wanna be stewards of what they are inheriting for the future.

This is a chance for me to change what's going on in my community.

Students in Alabama are our world changers.

We are so proud of the work that is being done from Huntsville to Mobile.

Our vision again is every child, every chance, every day.

We hope that you have learned something from our state's finest teachers and brightest students.

To learn more about career and technical education, visit alabamactso.org.

Thank you so much for joining us.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues)