Nancy Edmonds Hanson
hansonnanc@gmail.com

Moorhead High School students may soon be able to peer into their own futures, thanks to an ambitious vocational program included in the upcoming school bond referendum to rebuild their school.
Part of the $110 million proposal that voters will decide Nov. 5 funds a new facility to extend the meaning of “vocational education” far beyond what it generally means today. The MHS Career Academy – to be housed in the former Sam’s Club facility just north of Interstate 94 – will offer every student a chance to learn more about career paths they can choose, from the usual voc ed basics like auto technology and construction to careers in health sciences and human services, “farm to table” (from agriculture to culinary arts), high-tech options like robotics and cyber security, business marketing and management, aviation, architecture and engineering.
“Students already are getting a strong academic core at Moorhead High. It’s good, and it’s getting even better,” says assistant superintendent Tamara Uselman, who’s spearheading the career education plan. “We’re big believers in the humanities – the arts, law and other fields.
“But it’s not our job to tell kids what they should want to be. We need to get them ready to choose. Our role is to enable them to find what’s right for each of them, from the trades to science and the humanities. Each one has gifts – some known, some undiscovered. It’s an honor to help them uncover where their personal passions lie.”
The Career Academy, as it’s envisioned, will play a part in every student’s school life. They’ll be bused to the new facility to spend time in vocational classrooms and labs, all outfitted with the latest technology appropriate to the field they’re sampling.
While the high-tech environment there encourages discovery and experimentation, Uselman notes it will serve a second purpose: Splitting their time between the center and classes in the new high school also extends the number of students the high school can comfortably serve. “Plans call for a high school to accommodate 2,200 to 2,400 students,” she says, adding that as the current school population grows up, enrollment in grades 9 through 12 is projected to exceed 2,400 by 2024. The Career Academy will accommodate 300 to 700 of them at various times throughout the day.
Plans call for MHS’s academic classrooms to be spread between three all-new three-story wings directly north of the present facility, all flooded with natural light and completely accessible to students with mobility issues. That first phase of construction is projected for completion in 2023. During the second phase in 2024, the south side of the present high school will be torn down and reconstructed for fine arts classrooms and performing spaces, administrative offices, athletic support areas, a fieldhouse and aquatics center adjoining the existing Moorhead Sports Center at the east end of the complex.
Meanwhile – assuming the bond referendum passes – the Career Academy program would be developed next year while the Sam’s Club property is renovated, with its opening slated for 2021.
“We want to reinvent the concept of who is smart,” Uselman says. “It shouldn’t be limited just to academic ability. It’s being able to answer the question, ‘Can you solve the problem in front of you?’ Kids have huge gifts, but they’re not all the same. We can look at their abilities through a deficit lens, as we do too often today. Or we can recognize and celebrate all of their assets.”
Speaking of students in the Alternative Learning Center, which will also be a part of the Career Academy, she continues, “If you have faced some of what many of our students have faced and still look to the future, believe me, you have assets that should be recognized and honored.”
The goal of the Career Academy, with its multiple areas of study, is to offer every teen a taste of success in a job or profession that suits them. “This will be ideal for the round-peg kids who don’t fit well in a square-peg high school. Every student will get to explore careers, including some they’ve never thought of before. College-bound students can forge ahead with new insights and purpose. Some may choose to build on what they’ve learned with parallel programs offered by M State. Still others? Perhaps they’ll go straight into employment, where their skills are most definitely needed.”
The Career Academy’s multiple pathways to success are an idea that emerged from the citizen committees who contributed to planning for the new high school. More than three dozen community members spent much of 2018 and early 2019 debating and studying the school district’s high school needs and options, from whether to split 9th through 12th graders among two separate schools or keep them in a new, improved central facility, to what kinds of facilities should be included.
The vocational center was inspired in part by the group’s research in Bismarck, the school system which Uselman served as superintendent while several of its K-12 schools were being built. The Moorhead volunteers visited not only the city’s three new or remodeled high schools, but also its freestanding career education center. Afterwards, she says, “I could see the light bulbs come on.” Their enthusiasm for what they’d seen there carried all the way through their recommendation for one high school plus a separate career center, which was ultimately ratified by the Moorhead school board.
Uselman, who grew up in New York Mills, Minnesota, taught social studies and English in the high school from which she’d graduated for 14 years before being appointed principal. (“I supervised some of the teachers who’d taught me years before,” she notes.) She went on to spend the next eight years as superintendent in Perham, Minnesota, before moving to Bismarck in 2011 and Moorhead in 2018.
The availability of the discount warehouse building and grounds, she says, was a stroke of luck. The district purchased it this year for about $30 per square foot, a total of about $4 million. With the building shell plus the surrounding parking lots, infrastructure and landscaping already in place, she estimates the entire package would have cost from $10 to $12 million to build from the ground up. With what education pros call FF&E – furniture, fixtures and equipment – the entire academy is expected to come in at about $20 million.
It will, that is, as long as the bond issue passes. Without that source of funding, all bets are off. Plans might proceed, but without the bond issue, its future is uncertain.
“The career pathways we envision are a lot like chutes and ladders,” she reflects. “We don’t want them to be like silos. The health and human potential pathway, for example, offers options from CNAs and nursing to medical fields like sports medicine, as well as related areas – careers involving teaching and human services, even cosmetology. Information technology and design thinking encompass specialties from cyber security and game design to architecture, engineering, electronics, robotics and digital art. Transportation may include auto tech and body, but also railroad careers, trucking and aviation – even getting a pilot’s license.
“We want to offer kids all kinds of opportunities to get hands-on experience and insights that lay the foundation for their futures,” Uselman says. “When they’re engaged in something that makes their eyes light up in a nurturing high school environment, they’ll be ready to enter the college scene and the working world with the confidence that comes from already having successes under their belt.”