Students Seeking Alternative Paths To Education

Jesse Ross’ Honda Nighthawk motorcycle winds up like a blues singer, turning summer days into a throaty howl for adolescence.

Hear the machine, and it’s no wonder that Ross is turning to automotive training for his post-secondary education. He’s been tinkering with cars for four years and owns two, but, like many young men, motorcycles are special.

“I’ve been riding it because I’m redoing the tranny in my truck,” said Ross, a Rogers High senior. “It’s pretty fun to ride, especially in the summer.”

Ross plans to be one of a growing number of students who continue their education in an unusual way. Recent changes in federal and state laws require teachers and counselors to pay more attention to job preparation, in an effort to make school better training ground for life outside the classroom.

So students like Ross, classmate Jennifer Campbell and Mead’s Shata Stucky are likely to become more the norm than the exception.

Ross, sitting in his adviser’s office last week, had transmission fluid on his T-shirt and axle grease under his fingernails, proof that he was preparing for a test in his shop class.

“I’d rather spend nine months in a trade school and wind up getting paid good money” than go to college, said Ross, who plans to attend Wyoming Technical Institute.

Campbell agrees. Like most, she has college plans. Eventually, not immediately.

“I just got done with 12 years of school, so another four years doesn’t sound so good,” Campbell said.

So she surprised her friends and family and enlisted in the Army.

She’ll be an intelligence analyst during her four years. Training in South Carolina starts in July. “I’m not worried. I know I won’t be sent to a war,” she said.

It means good pay, benefits, security, and help with college tuition, whenever she enrolls.

“Why pay money for something now when I don’t know what I want to do with it?” she said.

Shata Stucky is sure her life path will take her to college as well - after all, she’s been accepted to Yale.

But the Mead High senior is in no hurry to cram for mid-terms and pull all-nighters.

Instead, she’s planning to live for a year in a Spanish-speaking country, Spain, Costa Rica, maybe Argentina.

She hopes to live abroad, get used to the food and spices, adjust to the pace of life, and get a job - perhaps as a waitress or nanny. Yale allows students to enroll a year after admittance, she said.

“My dad knew people in college who’d done it, and he said they just seemed so much older and wiser,” said Stucky.

Other students are discovering alternative work experiences. A recruiter for the Montana-based Heartland Nannies talked to North Central and Mead students about caring for kids on the East Coast.

“The families like kids from this area,” said Karen Ryan, owner of Heartland.

Several North Side students are interested, and a local recruiter is interviewing students, checking driving records and verifying references.

“For a student coming out of high school, unsure what they want, it’s a great experience,” said Ryan.

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