Chairman Castle, members of the committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify about the benefits the Perkins Act delivers in southwest Ohio. Great Oaks serves two major constituencies that have benefited from the direction set by this legislation. The first is the students – both high school students and adults. The second group is businesses, industries, and government agencies.

In today’s globally competitive economy, employers need, and are demanding, that employees have increasingly high levels of academic and technical skills. The goals the Perkins Act sets, and the funding the Act provides, are invaluable to Great Oaks and other career and technical school districts in preparing students with these skills.

Let me tell you briefly about Great Oaks. We are a public school district, funded primarily by local tax dollars, along with state and federal allocations. We provide the career and technical education programs for 36 public school districts spread across 12 Ohio counties – an area the approximate size of the State of Rhode Island. There are urban, suburban, and rural school districts affiliated with Great Oaks. Some are well financed; others are economically disadvantaged.

Each year we educate some 3,000 junior and senior high school students on our four campuses in full day programs, and another 3,000 in technology programs we offer in their home schools.

We coordinate career education services for 120,000 students in grades K through 12 with the support of Perkins funds.

Over 50,000 adults a year enroll in programs or receive services. These range from police, fire and emergency medical training to electricity and culinary programs.

We work closely with more than 1,000 employers and post-secondary institutions to keep our programs on the cutting edge. Our business partners range from small, independent businesses to global corporations including Procter & Gamble, GE, and Ford.

The Perkins legislation recognized that businesses and post-secondary institutions were demanding more rigorous – and ever changing - academic and technical skills from their employees and students. The Perkins Act reauthorizations directly addressed this need by requiring that core academics – math, science, language and social studies – be integrated into the technical curriculum.

In response, Great Oaks has made – and continues to make – significant improvements in the curriculum that is delivered and the way we deliver it. We now prepare students for careers … for continuing their education, for continuing to learn new skills.

This first significant improvement is the increased emphasis on more rigorous, integrated academics. General math and science classes have evolved into advanced algebra, calculus, microbiology and anatomy. Competencies are aligned with the standards of the Department of Education, industry certifications and post-secondary requirements. Teams of teachers – both academic and technical – then collaborate to ensure that these competencies are integrated into their curriculum.

The value of career-technical education is that students have an opportunity to learn a concept in a variety of ways. In math and physics, a construction student learns about loads and vectors. She then goes into her lab and applies these principles to build a bridge.

Beginning this year, senior students are required to complete Capstone Projects to demonstrate their mastery of competencies they have learned. The project must be related to their career path. They will conduct research and present their findings to a panel of experts.

The second major improvement in our delivery system is an increased emphasis on continuing education. Since the Perkins Act was last reauthorized in 1998, Great Oaks has seen the percentage of graduates who continue immediately onto postsecondary education nearly double. In 1998, about 20 percent of our graduates went on directly to postsecondary education. In 2003, more than 35 percent did.

Great Oaks has 132 agreements with community colleges, four-year institutions, technical institutes and apprenticeship programs throughout the country. Through these agreements, students earn advanced credit in their area of specialization. Our goal is to enable students to move seamlessly from a Great Oaks campus to a post-secondary institution – and to arrive with up to 35 hours of credits already in place. Students from our Police Academy can enter Xavier University with 24 credits and those in Health Technology can receive 26 credits at the University of Cincinnati.

Because in 1998, Perkins Act III created other core performance measures, I want to note that within a year of graduation, 98% of our graduates are employed, continuing on to postsecondary education or both, or have been accepted into the Armed Forces.

Our third significant improvement is an Individualized Academic Plan for each student. For a successful education, we are customizing each student’s career path, constantly measuring student progress, and providing counseling and other support services. Perkins funding is extremely helpful in enabling us to meet students’ needs for career counseling and other support services. Starting with the coming year, students, parents, teachers and counselors will agree on a plan that outlines what that student needs to graduate and continue on a specific career path. It is the optimum way to ensure that students receive the education they need to continue on to a productive career.

Conclusion

Over more than 20 years, the Perkins Act has regularly given career and technical education goals in workforce development that enable us to meet the needs of employers – and thereby to better prepare our students for careers.

And Perkins funds help us in very targeted and important ways: recruitment of instructors, professional development, placement, support for students with disabilities and career education services.

The Perkins Act serves the nation’s economy and career and technical students well. I am confident that you and your colleagues will write Perkins IV to meet the needs of American business as our employers seek to thrive in a highly competitive global economy. The corollary to that proposition is that Perkins IV should continue to assist the many, many young people and adults who learn best in the hands-on environment of career and technical education.