“It's truly an honor to be here today as co-chair of the Business and Education Partnership (BEP). I want to take a moment to thank Magen and the Bay Area Chamber of Commerce for working together to create this bond between educators and employees in Bay County. The BEP has really come alive in the last few years, and a lot of it has to do with Magen's leadership and her team.
I want you to know that this type of partnership doesn't exist in all chambers. The BEP is a rather unique entity when you look at chambers across the country. Along with building relationships between educators and employers, we're doing a lot of work improving students’ soft skills and building a network of potential work-based learning opportunities to build talent pipelines into Bay County businesses.
–Mike Vieau, Superintendent of the Bay-Arenac ISD
“We know that the first five years in a child's life are the most important. These five years are a critical period for development, laying the foundation for a child's future learning, behavior and mental health. Children develop attachment, emotional regulation, social skills, language and physical skills. This skill development is nurtured through responsive, caregiving, stimulating environments, language, rich environments and healthy habits.
The Early Childhood department at Bay-Arenac ISD helps to support those first five years and beyond in a variety of ways. Home Visiting is important in our system. Our Starting Strong program supports all children prenatal through age five. We help families understand that they are their child's first teacher. That program is open to all families, regardless of income or risk factors. Our Early On program support families with children from birth through three years old that have a child with a disability developmental delays or at risk for delays due to certain health conditions. You might be most familiar with our preschool program called GSRP or Pre-K for all, as you might start to hear it called. This program is for four year olds. It has expanded and will continue to expand under the governor's initiative.
We are providing around 500 children an opportunity for GSRP annually, and when they leave our programs, over 90% are meeting for exceeding expectations. Why does this matter? Because, based on the Heckman Study at the Perry Preschool, high quality early childhood education can break the cycle of poverty and has the potential to lift multiple generations out of poverty. We also have this great thing going at the Career Center.
At the Career Center, we're also training high school students for careers in education: whether that's a career in a preschool, special education, speech language pathology, an OT and PT, and early education field.
The way that mental health has changed over the years has astounded me. We have seen a rise in the need for mental health support in young children, so a couple of years ago, we wrote a grant for something called Parent-Child interaction therapy, and it's just come to fruition. We don't have any outcomes yet, but we're really hoping to see some positive outcomes from that grant.”
—Gretchen Wagner, Director of Early Childhood at the Bay-Arenac ISD
“The power of a co-op is actually why I'm here today. 47 years ago, my mother had the opportunity as a junior in high school in Indiana to take on an internship at a local small Insurance Agency. 47 years later, she is still in that same job and that opportunity opened up a wealth of opportunities for my family. That internship allowed my family to purchase a trailer, which was our first home for my first five years. After saving up and my mom continuing to work in the insurance industry, my parents purchased a small farm in Indiana, and I was able to grow up seeing the power of hard work and the power of small business. That allowed me to become a college student and earn four degrees, which I'm incredibly thankful for. My mom moved up to become part owner and then full owner of that insurance business about 10 years ago, and she was able to do all of that thanks to the partnership between a local community business and a school to give students an opportunity. So thank you to the Business and Education Partnership for the work that you’re doing.
I would do our profession a disservice if I don't talk about the harsh reality of public education right now and the division that we see play out in news at the national, world, state, and local level. Our teachers are having to have difficult conversations, our administrators, our bus drivers, our paraprofessionals, our custodians and our faculty are working hard on how to best navigate these challenges and complexities. Social media, in a lot of ways, has not helped that piece, as we continue to figure out ways to be able to navigate the complex reality of social media, misinformation, cyber bullying, children sending inappropriate messages back and forth, and the role of technology in our classrooms.
On top of that, school attendance, nationwide and within our area, has continued to show it has not met pre-pandemic levels, and we're seeing the impact of that across the spectrum. From early childhood all the way through our highschool seniors, we have the continual challenge of navigating attendance and getting students to show up every single day they're healthy in order to be able to access what we're able to provide them on a daily basis.
We're continuing to see an immense amount of challenges with student behavior, that is taxing our teachers, our staff, our administrators, bus drivers, etc, and we're continuing to find creative ways to be able to navigate and to be able to provide better support to make sure that these students are successful and that we're supporting families.
Dr. Robert Putnam was a former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He also wrote the book The Upswing: How America came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. And the core of his argument is getting folks back to face to face. We have a Superintendent’s Cabinet that allows us to have these kinds of conversations with students and hear what’s on their minds. We had 20 students apply to be on this cabinet three years ago, but I have 87 students on my cabinet today because of the power of conversation. We also have benefited from partnerships with the other local districts and the ISD. We work with Bangor to be to share a mental health counselor for our earliest of learners. We work with Bay City Public Schools by sending our teachers to talk about science instruction. In my time in the K-12 setting, I have never seen an example of a Career Center to the level of the quality that we have right here in Bay County with the support of the ISD, and we need to be thankful for that.
I also just want to highlight the importance of colleges and universities in this work. Thanks to Delta College, Saginaw Valley State University, and CMU, our students were able to gain over 200 college credits last year while they were students at Garber High School. That's huge, and that partnership is incredibly important.
I’ve talked about the harsh reality of what public education is, but I'm still hopeful. That's why I'm in this work, and that's why our teachers show up every single day. We know that education is a core component of strong communities. Internships, sponsorships, employment opportunities, apprenticeships, guest speakers—all of that is critical. I ask that you use your position to listen, ask questions, share and talk with others about the work of public education. You see something out there that doesn't look right on social media or whatever news source it may be, come to a superintendent, come to a building administrator, come to a teacher and ask for more information, because so often that information is not correct and it is continuing to cause further harm to an already strained profession.
So with that, thank you again for this opportunity. I am excited about the work we're doing and through partnerships and working together as a community, we can continue to advance education for our students.”
—Dr. Justin Ralston, Superintendent of Essexville-Hampton Public Schools
“Thank you all for being here. Thank you for the invitation. I want to highlight three important areas for us in higher education and our communities. One is the environment: how can we attract more talent for our businesses? The second is providing high quality education: early childhood education, K through 12, and higher education. That’s going to attract people while also providing an educated workforce. The third is a safe environment with quality health care.
I have a friend from 20 years ago. He was president of the university, and when I became president here at SVSU, we had a conversation and he said, ‘What's your top priority?’ I said, ‘Campus safety.’ He looked at me with a little bit of a nervous laugh. Things are happening in the world and we need to make sure our students are safe. We’re updating all of our equipment, our cameras, our policies to make sure that our campus is a safe campus. Safety is a top priority, along with mental health.
Something that we're doing at the university is building an Environmental Research Station, and that's going to expand our water testing, beach erosion, and a lot of different areas. Our faculty will be working with our students to evaluate things like water quality because that impacts community safety and tourism. We also have faculty from other parts of the country who want to be involved in the research that we're doing and that we're helping to build a stronger relationship. That Environmental Research Center is going to provide opportunities for K through 12 students to be involved in the research as well.
Another key component is our work with Delta College. A month or so ago, SVSU and Delta signed an agreement to enhance the relationship between the two institutions. We wanted to make sure, from a transfer standpoint, that whatever a person wants to transfer that they're able to do that. The other is that a student at Delta with an associate's degree in nursing can transfer to us and have a Bachelor's degree in Science of Nursing. We want to make sure that we’re putting out more qualified students in the healthcare field. Finally, the Michigan Achievement Scholarship will give students at Delta or Saginaw Valley the opportunity to go tuition-free.”
—Dr. George Grant, President of Saginaw Valley State University
On October 30th, the Bay Area Chamber of Commerce and the Business and Education Partnership hosted the State of Education at Liberty Harbor Event Center on Midland Street in Bay City, Michigan.
