For those of you that may not know me, my name is Patrick Burris, and I am in my first year as one of the College & Career Coaches at New Castle High School. I graduated from New Castle in 2009, and returning to my alma mater has been a fulfilling, rewarding, and humbling experience. Working mainly with the Junior and Senior classes, I have the privilege of watching them grow and mature as they plan for the difficult decisions they must face as they approach graduation. Through career exploration activities, internship experiences, and targeted college and work-based field trips, my passion has been ignited in helping to mentor the next generation of Trojans!
I would like to quickly highlight just how much New Castle High School has evolved and grown over the past 15 years, since my graduation. When I walked out those doors in 2009, I was leaving with 6 college credits (the equivalent of 2 classes), and I was absolutely ecstatic! New Castle had 4 different Advanced Placement college courses in which you could take a test at the end of the year. It was a big deal!
Now, as it has already been highlighted, we have 20 dual credit courses, 8 AP courses, 14 specific career pathways, Early College classes at Ivy Tech, the Career Center, JAG, and a developing internship program. Students have never had more choices and options than they do today!
I hope students, their families, and the whole community realize that New Castle is truly at the forefront of changing the way education is conducted in Indiana. The future of education in Indiana is going to emphasize employability skills, work-based/hands-on learning experiences, tailored career pathways, trades, and peer-to-peer collaboration.
As we transition into the future, we hope that you as supportive community members will be willing to come along and participate in this journey with us. After all, one of the goals of our program is to produce productive students and citizens that are prepared with the soft skills and employability skills needed for today and tomorrow’s workforce needs, hopefully here in central Indiana and New Castle/Henry County.
As advisors, coaches, and educators, we hear that our community’s biggest needs in the labor force relate to attendance, timeliness, communication skills, perseverance, grit, awareness, responsibility, and the willingness to take feedback. Through these work-based learning experiences, you can have a hand in molding and developing these skills with your future employees and workforce in a rewarding, cost-effective, hands-on way. A dream scenario would be to build a pipeline of future talent to our community.
This Spring of 2024, we were able to develop our first group and cohort of the New Castle Future Careers Internship program. We have been able to place 16 students in different work-based learning, project based learning, and internship opportunities. At the beginning of this process, I let the students and our business partners know that this was our initial trial run and they were the guinea pigs. But everyone seemed extra excited and motivated to be the first group and to pave and smooth the way for future classes!