Genessee Area Skills Center Technology Center
Doug Weir
G-5081 Torrey Road
Flint, Mich. 48507
(810) 760-1444

If you're under the impression that Michael Moore's quasi-documentary film "Roger and Me" accurately portrays conditions in Flint, Mich., you need to have a short talk with Doug Weir, principal of Flint's innovative GASC Technology Center. "That one HURT Flint," Weir says. "We're doing OK. We have a lot of really good people in Flint." The auto industry, including General Motors, has 17 plants in the region, Weir says, and the plants are hiring.

And as time goes by, the chances are that a significant number of Flint's high-skill workers will be graduates of the GASC Technology Center, an effective "school-to-work" program so innovative that it was honored with an invitation to the White House in May 1994 to watch and be honored as President Bill Clinton signed into law the federal School-to-Work Opportunity Act, which will put $300 million into schools like this one.

GASC, started some 25 years ago as a standard, traditional vocational-education high school, is transforming under the leadership of Weir and his staff into a cutting-edge vocational school for the 21st Century. Not long ago, Weir said, vocational education focused simply on skills: "This is a wrench. This is how to use it." Now, however, high-tech employers are less interested in specific skills, which quickly become out of date, and more interested in flexible employees who know how to research, learn, network, solve problems and move easily from one job to another.

Using a model somewhat like Germany's school-to-work and apprenticeship programs with a lot of creative twists all its own, GASC is well along the way toward becoming the nation's leading model of the new kind of vocational education. Offering the top two grades of high school and open through competition to high school students from all 31 high schools in 21 school districts in Genessee County, Mich., GASC accepts 2,000 students each year and must turn down hundreds more.

Moving toward a concept called "Platform Programming," the school divides work training into eight major categories: Business, Building Trades, Cosmetology, Electronics, Food Service, Graphic Communication, Medical Health and -- in partnership with local industry and unions in a unique Manufacturing Technology Partnership Program -- Manufacturing.

Students in each of these categories may specialize in a particular career path, but they work together -- very much as they would in the workplace -- with other students pursuing related careers. Pre-medical students, for instance, study with nursing students and would-be X-ray technicians and paramedics. In every category, students and the school link with local businesses that provide training, mentors and, in many cases, actual paying jobs. Business students pursuing banking careers, for example, actually attend classes at the local Citizen's Bank. Others learn entrepreneurship by running actual small businesses within the school, including the a snack bar, a bakery and gift shop, and a professional catering kitchen and conference center. Manufacturing students work summers and after school in the General Motors plants or other local industry, earning $6.25 an hour as they learn. General Motors, in fact, promises jobs for successful graduates, and stakes them to college scholarships after they graduate for additional training before they begin to work. And in the Building Trades "platform" still being designed, students will build two complete houses every school year, houses that on completion will be trucked to city lots and sold as low-cost housing.

The program is still new, with the oldest platform, the Manufacturing Technology Partnership Program, being only three years old; and three platforms remain to be geared up over the next 18 months. But it's already showing strong signs of success: Of the first 32 MTP graduates, every single one passed the GM/UAW Trades Test, and GM has sent every one to college. Of overall graduates, GASC boasts a 92 percent placement rate, with 62 percent moving on to college and the rest in the kind of good jobs they were trained for. GASC gets the job done with a staff of 110 (including 55 teachers) and a $7 million annual budget supported by the county school tax.

This program is working. It's a model. And yes, Michael Moore missed it when he made his movie in Flint.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

Send him E-mail.

Back to the @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG Home Page