Kathy Greenich

What is your number one concern for this school year?

Funding. We are on the ballot for the first time and Ohio schools must put levees and bond issues on the ballot and the public votes on those. Most of our school funding comes from real estate taxes and we have not been on the ballot for 29 years, which you hope would be a selling point, but we know the economy is hard with gas prices the way they are and things. We have record enrollment which means we are limited in space, and we have some buildings that were built in 1968. We’ve maintained them well, but we need to continue to do replacement of HVAC, boilers and such.

In Ohio, there are some strange new laws that schools can share facts about their school district, their needs, what the money would be used for, and what we do for our community, but not ask for support. As a career center, we do a lot of community service. Our buildings trades class does work with Habitat for Humanity, our Air Force ROTC does a lot of work in our parks and all the flag ceremonies at community events. We want to highlight those kinds of things. We are also the career workforce development training center for two to three counties in our area, so businesses need us and we’re going to try to highlight all those facts.

Safety is always a concern in any school year. That’s from training staff, training students, watching accidents, why are accidents happening, etc. We love PublicSchoolWORKS in the area of accidents because you can send out that training right away if it was a slip/fall or a ladder issue. We just had the Bureau of Worker’s Comp come in as a site visit that we requested as part of our PublicSchoolWORKS tasks to complete and they gave us a lot of things to note. For instance, equipment had gotten pushed in front of the eye wash station, so now we have a checklist we’re going to utilize PublicSchoolWORKS to send out four times a year to our lab instructors. They’ll need to go through that and make sure all ladders are chained, all ladders have labeling, and so forth. PublicSchoolWORKS is very integral to what we do.

What are your goals for the next five years?

Expansion and taking advantage of all the opportunities that are being offered to us. Across the nation, career tech education and the technical trades are being highlighted and we have a high school of over 650 students that come here as an elective from their regular high school. We offer academic classes and then half a day of a career tech lab. We also have adult education which is all about careers. Those programs run day and night. On weekends we do public safety, nursing, welding, and all sorts of programs. Because the need for people in the trades is so relevant and in the news, and everyone needs workers, we are a very hot topic. We’ve had the governor in our building and the lieutenant governor visit our programs.

For a long time, trade schools were kind of second class or looked down on because everyone was supposed to go to college. We offer an associate degree to high school students. Students can earn college credit while they’re at KCCC. We know some of our students will go to college, but a lot of our students go straight to the work force and then their employers will pay for them to go to college because they’re in construction management or whatever, but I think we’re the best of all of education wrapped up in one thing.

Where do you see the role of technology in education?

In our school it is embedded in everything we do. It’s in all of our academics, plus all of our career tech labs whether it’s computer networking and cyber security and digital media, or auto tech who are using computers to align and diagnosis and even our welders can have machines that measure the strength of a weld. Technology is just part of every industry we are training students to work in. It’s not an add-on, it’s just part of it. We love to utilize apps where teachers can monitor what students are doing. Some of those things we picked up during the pandemic when we were in remote learning part of the time. Others we were using before or added since. One example is the use of Clear Touch TV screens which teachers are able to move data around or lay it flat and allow our preschoolers to stand around and do all kinds of activities with an interactive board. Our students will be utilizing technology no matter what they’re doing so we need to help them learn how to use technology to be a life-long learner.

Even in the area of student safety and mental health, we have programs running to catch any trigger words that students may be using in their writing or their searches, so if they’re searching “suicide” or “ammunition” or even “I hate” – it can point us to what student so a counselor can check in with them. We’re just trying to utilize technology in every area we can to not only help students learn but also keep them safe and healthy.

A drawback I’ve seen is that some students don’t interact well with technology in the sense that it’s not their best learning modality. They need to be conversing and not just looking at a screen. I think we’re all probably better learners when we’re not just looking at a screen. I think we can’t become too dependent on it and that’s why I love how we utilize it in our labs. Our collision repair students might be able to see how paint is being mixed and watch that on a computer screen, but they also have to know the math and the measurements behind it so they can put the right thing in so the machine can do the work correctly.

How are you approaching teacher retention or staff shortages?

We did alright with our teaching positions this year. We actually had several candidates for each position, sometimes five to ten candidates. The teacher shortage wasn’t a big issue for us, but we are starting to see less applicants for special education and even trades. For example, someone in their trade can be making over $100,000, and we are offering around $60,000 as a starting teacher salary with five years experience. Attracting people out of the field is getting harder and harder for career centers because they’re making so much in the trades right now.  We usually attract from our alumni who want to come back and give back. Almost every career tech teacher we hired this year was an alum who had graduated from here.

How are you cultivating an environment that supports mental health?

I think one of the most innovative things we’ve done, is we had a really big crisis with a staff member dying a few years ago and it left staff reeling. We immediately called for counselors and our county has a chaplain group of local pastors that came in and provided counseling. But I knew it was a long-term thing, especially for the staff. We have armed staff here, and we have a therapist on board who we were contracting with for psychological exams for any staff who wanted to be armed. I pulled her in and said, “Hey, can you be on call to take appointments for these people.” As we did that, we had more staff members with issues arise who also needed some counseling. We have counseling covered in our insurance, but a lot of people don’t take advantage of that, or it takes months to get an appointment to see a counselor, so I offer our staff up to two visits with our on-call social worker therapist and that’s free. The district covers that cost. We feel like she can really assess and ask if they want to keep going and then they can either pay her outright or use our insurance and find a counselor that they want.

It came out of necessity, and I felt it was the right thing to do, but as I share it with other people they say they didn’t think of that or realize it was something they could offer. It’s been great.  I highly encourage school districts to provide mental health help. If a staff member’s behavior at work changes – if they’re not doing their work and they were doing it, something is going on. Before I write them up or even terminate, we start way down the road and ask what is going on. Is there something going on at home? You don’t have to tell us, but if it would help, can I make you an appointment with our therapist? And so many times, they’re like “yes I’ve got something going on at home.” It kind of takes the burden off them, and I’m helping them. They see that we’re working together. It’s very proactive rather than punitive and that’s how I like to lead.

People have been very appreciative of it because sometimes they don’t realize it’s carrying over into work, or work is such a low priority for them at that time if they have a troublesome diagnosis or if a spouse has an issue going on at home. We can deal with that and let them know that we’re going to get them through this part at work, and a lot of the time their work will improve because they know we care and the pressure is off. We know they might have a bad day, but we’re with them. And it’s well worth the $100 an hour or whatever the counseling rate is, to have an employee that feels better and gets the help they need, rather than try to terminate and find a new employee.

The therapist will also do three days a week with our students and those are usually referrals from guidance counselors or teachers.