The Fare Forward Interview with Vanessa Ramirez
CTE (Career and Technical Education, also known as trade school or vocational training) has experienced a resurgence in the sphere of education and education policy. To get a glimpse into this often-overlooked subject, Fare Forward spoke with Vanessa Ramirez, board chair and co-founder of WorkTexas Training Center. WorkTexas is a nonprofit, grassroots organization that provides CTE-inclusive education in Houston, Texas.
Interview conducted by Pierce Gillen.
Fare Forward: What is WorkTexas? How and why did you decide to found this organization?
Vanessa Ramirez: I’m super fortunate to have been called in by my mentor and fifth grade teacher, Mike Feinberg, who had just received a call from Jim McIngvale, who’s known as “Mattress Mack” here in Houston. Mack had just gotten back from a conference, and based on what he had heard, he wanted to repurpose showroom space inside one of his Gallery Furniture stores for the greater good. And because of the conference was around Dirty Jobs—I think that was the name of the conference—he wanted it to have a vocational training component.
Since 1981, Mack has been sort of Houston’s social worker—a business leader who gives back to the community. And because of that, because of his role and his platform, he had a lot of community members coming in asking for assistance, often in crisis mode and/or stuck in this self-perpetuating cycle. But on the flip side, he also had a lot of the employer partners coming in saying, “Hey, we’re looking for good people, we can’t find good people–or if we find them, we can’t keep them.” So he thought, “Surely I can repurpose showroom space for the greater good and meet both of those needs, right? How do we get people out of crisis mode towards financially stable, financially successful lives as well as get these employer partners the employees that they need in order to respond to the demand for their services?”
When I got the call from Mike Feinberg, though, I had been researching the surrounding area. It’s actually my neighborhood, where I grew up and where KIPP [Editor’s Note: Knowledge Is Power Program, a national network of charter schools] was founded. But I really worked for the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department, and I had been charged by our executive director and juvenile court judges to find a comprehensive approach to redirecting young adults involved in the juvenile justice system. And it wasn’t new, you know, it just was sad, to confirm that it was still a food desert, a quality early childhood program desert, a quality education desert, and it was all operating in silos. So when I was brought in to be a part of the design process for the new holistic programming, we really got a chance to develop proof of concept–not just for the vocational programs, but as a response to juvenile justice, the needs of juvenile justice youth.
So we went from a furniture store that had repurposed 15,000 square feet of showroom space, to transforming it into a vocational training school, and then into a one-stop-shop community center that happens to sell furniture. Because a credit recovery High School was added for fourteen-to-twenty-six-year-olds, and a childcare preschool was also added right across the dining room showroom space for about eighty to one hundred infants to four-year-olds, to ensure that access to quality childcare wouldn’t present itself as a barrier to accessing employment. So yeah, we’re proud to have now graduated about 180 students across five different cohorts and are getting ready to launch our second location in southwest Houston.
FF: So for you, this is a way to help your hometown where you grew up. But it’s also a way to channel people into a better path for their entire lives.
VR: Yeah, absolutely. Employment is the intervention that can pull anyone out of crisis mode or out of vulnerable-to-crisis mode.. Whether you’re choosing to go to college or trades, it’s still a means to an end, which is employment—doing something that is leading to your ability to save for your family, address the basic needs and/or build wealth for your children or your grandchildren, etc. And so focusing on not just the hard skills, but also the soft skills shouldn’t be an either/or: not either I go to college, or I explore the trades—it’s an and. Whatever the soft skills you need to succeed through high school are the same skills you need to succeed through vocational training, an entry level job, promotion.
School is for you. It’s just we’ve not learned to adapt it to life’s needs. We’ve said it’s a one-size-fits-all, you must adapt, and that’s just not what life is like at all.
FF: So you have a high school, Premier High School, and then you have a more CTE trade school focus for adults. Is the trade school for adults free as well?
VR: Yes. Mack’s favorite thing is “Free, Free, Free” So as much as we can keep it free to align with the Gallery Furniture mission, we will do that. And given it’s a charter school—that’s public school—it’s absolutely free to the community. Premier High School has embedded vocational programming throughout the entire program model, whether it’s for a fourteen year-old or a twenty-six-year-old.
FF: How might a local student who is districted for a more traditional high school get started on this CTE-inclusive track?
VR: Well, I can speak particularly for Premier High School; given it’s a charter school, it isn’t restricted to zip codes or zones. Any student that is able to get to school every day can access a program like the one at Premier High School at Gallery Furniture. Students would have to just bring their school record so that the school staff would be able to assess their transcript to determine where they are academically. What’s also pretty neat about Premier High School, among many things, is that differentiation is the name of the game at Premier, because it has to be individualized. We have a fourteen-year-old who is expecting to do all of high school with Premier. But we also have those eighteen-year-olds who are just two credits shy of graduating, we have those twenty-four-year-olds who need all four years of high school, and we have those twenty-six-year-olds who also are just missing that one credit.
Our staff needs to be able to differentiate according to what that student needs, so that he or she can address not just the academic component, but also enroll in a vocational training of their choice. And what makes it so fascinating is that the academic bloc gets about three hours, and the vocational piece is another hour and a half; that’s about four hours and thirty minutes of your typical eight-hour school day. Which means that there is this additional time for those students that have seen school and work as “either/or” to make it an “and.” So go to school, get your trade, and you still have about three and a half hours left of that typical school day where you can go volunteer, go to work, go take care of life’s needs. So they are not presented with yet another reason for why school wasn’t for me. School is for you. It’s just we’ve not learned to adapt it to life’s needs. We’ve said it’s a one-size-fits-all, you must adapt, and that’s just not what life is like at all.
FF: So you actually have a more condensed or truncated educational experience, then?
VR: The idea and concept is that we’re removing some of these extra things for fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds who could have gone to any high school but don’t really care about Homecoming, Prom, etc. They can get the same academic experience within those three hours daily. Same for those nineteen-to-twenty-six-year-olds who already have children, you know, have families, have lives, have jobs, have all kinds of responsibilities. It removes the either/or component and allows for them to have a more flexible schedule so that they can fit in school with everything else they’ve got to take care of.
As opposed to “now focus on academics,” and then it’s 4 p.m., “Now it’s employment,” it’s how can we marry both, so that they coexist, and students see it as an “and”?
FF: How do you strike a balance—say, for a high schooler who is fifteen years old—between the classroom learning and career readiness?
VR: I think one of the mighty lessons learned through this experience of designing WorkTexas alongside Mike and Mack and some of our training partners (and Houston Community College is a fantastic partner of ours, and our employer partners as well) was that even that is not an either/or. It’s about how you contextualize the academic component, so that it’s directly transferable to how students can perform within the trade. And I think it’s removing that separation—“Now it’s math. And now it’s soft skills training.” —versus, how can math embed the soft skills component as well, to ensure that students are continuing to practice these different skillsets? Then, as they practice, practice, practice, those skillsets become healthy habits that, once vocational programming is over, can translate into a more competitive employee. So I think that’s where we’ve flipped the script a little bit. As opposed to “now focus on academics,” and then it’s 4 p.m., “Now it’s employment,” it’s how can we marry both, so that they coexist, and students see it as an “and”?
FF: So it’s about integrating them. And this helps the students see the tangible benefits of the classroom learning in particular?
VR: Yeah. I remember when I worked at a workforce development agency in the past, and I have also founded another nonprofit. And one question that I think was really important to have been asked, because I had no idea how to answer it, was, “Why do I have to learn the Pythagorean Theorem?” And it’s like, “I don’t even remember it anymore, because that’s how old I am. But you’re right. I don’t know why we have to learn it.”
The reason I have to learn it is just to graduate from high school, if I don’t know how to contextualize it. I think these are the questions that students don’t know they have or don’t know how to ask, but that are informing why they choose to leave school early. When will I ever use it when I don’t have food at the table, and I’m the man of the house? Or when I got pregnant at XYZ age and now need to work for my child. These types of questions bubble up, especially right at the moment where they’re making decisions like, “Okay, I’ve got to go work, I’ve got to go and contribute to what my family’s needs are. Is continuing in school going to be a part of that?” In that moment, you’re not realizing how the lack of a high school diploma or GED is going to prevent you from accessing that promotion later on. Because you’re making a decision on the here and now. So if we could, as schools, do better about contextualizing how and when they will use this, then students could make informed decisions about college now or a career now, and then maybe college later.
How can we be more user-friendly to the student, to the parents, to their peers—anyone in the community so that we’re assessing what the next set of needs are going to be
FF: What do your students go on to do? Do most of them enter the workforce upon graduating? And if so, do you have a sense for their employment outcomes? And how many do go on to pursue higher education?
VR: Keep in mind we’ve got students at every level of credit needs. It’s pretty crazy that within the last two years since launch, we’ve already had a little over fifty students graduate, meaning that we had students who were just a few credits shy of graduating and that’s when they made that decision to leave school. We’ve had about 75 percent go straight into employment. Twenty-five percent of them explore college. The reason why the career number is higher is that the trainings we launched with were actually employer-led when we launched them, which meant that the employer was sending out their staff to train students and we’re essentially vetting their future workforce. That way it would be a much smoother transition from training to employment because they had been trained according to how the employer needed them to operate.
Just based on different programs that we’ve also been leveraging through Workforce Solutions and Houston Community College, our students were able to graduate from high school straight into programs like Workplace Learning, registered apprenticeships, etc. And that was very intentional as well, because our students are graduating from high school and still very much questioning, “What do I want to do when I grow up?” I’m still asking that, and I’m a lot older than the students who just graduated from high school. It’s part of this constant-learning kind of value that we hold tightly on to. Our kids are still trying to figure out what it is they want to do even after they graduate, so locking in that first employer or employment opportunity by no means speaks to what they want to do for the rest of their life. So programs like workplace learning or registered apprenticeship programs that are offered through Texas Workforce Commission are different programs that we make a little bit more streamlined and accessible to our students.
These programs have been in existence for years, decades. The reason why the student profile that tends to come to a Premier High School or WorkTexas, or even our programming now at the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department, the reason why you oftentimes don’t see them involved, engaged, enrolled in these types of programs is that the intake processes are so convoluted. They’re lathered in red tape. So if you’re taking a young adult who’s maybe even made a decision to not continue school—they’re still developing self-advocacy, being self-directed, asking questions—they’re not going to be the young adult that’s like, “Hey, TWC [Texas Workforce Commission], how can I navigate this application process?” Sometimes they’re going to say, “This is really difficult, and I will just take whatever job I can get.”
I’m a little biased because I love WorkTexas, but I think what makes WorkTexas incredibly special is that we make partnerships super easy. And it’s not with the intended purpose of getting these really great outcomes of who started training and who completed training. We’re backwards engineering from how we define financial stability, family stability, household stability. And who are the partners doing what they do very well out in Houston, in the surrounding areas? How can we partner with them in such a way that we present our programming as one, rather than: “Here are eight different partners processes, you’re gonna have to probably apply eight different times, you’ll figure it out”? How can we be more user-friendly to the student, to the parents, to their peers—anyone in the community so that we’re assessing what the next set of needs are going to be to: you got the job, great. How do we help make sure you keep the job? And then, how do we make sure you get that promotion? And then now that you got the promotion, how do we make sure that you’re lowering debt? So we’re incorporating financial coaching, financial literacy. I’ve seen different workforce development models that are about training, you know, they call it “Train and Pray,” like, “We train you and we pray you get a job.” And that’s wonderful and beautiful, right? But what if the baton pass to our partners could be more of a hard pass? We’re going to really hold on to that baton until we ensure that that young adult, or that adult, has been able to transition from training into employment, where they’ve passed this probationary period and they’re keeping that job. And where it’s not happening, how can we learn from those moments?
And that’s why we have the WorkTexas Alumni Association. We started with an alumni association since day one of programming, when we had no students. We didn’t even have a fully built-out training lab, but we knew we were going to have an alumni association, because we couldn’t call ourselves a workforce development agency unless we knew we had effectively developed you for the workforce. And the way to do that isn’t to check in the next day after you’ve completed the training, it’s three months out, it’s nine months out, it’s a year out. So we’ve committed to following up with our alums up to five years; obviously, the relationships continue past that. But if in five years we’ve not been a part of your support system, enough to be able to help you navigate challenges, then we’re not doing right by our students and our alumni. So we support our students who started with us in August of 2020, when we launched, and they’re still very much a part of our programming, even coming back for upskilling, volunteering, or joining us at one of the Astros games that Mack will send us to. It’s so that we are developing this kind of support system for all of our alums organically. And when they don’t want to call us because they don’t know how to navigate a challenge, they can call any of their peers from their cohort to help them navigate that as well.
The purpose, again, is not, “Can we can we get people enrolled in classes and graduate them?” It’s, “Can that training prepare them for employment?”
FF: You’ve talked at multiple junctures about these community partnerships that you have. And I was struck by the fact that you’ve worked so closely with private employers in your area, like Gallery Furniture and Trio Electric. I think this is a lot different from how people often think about education as a “bubble,” or maybe as preparation for the real world, but very much separate from it. So I was wondering how these relationships and partnerships got started, and how do they set you apart from other educational models?
VR: Beau Pollock, the founder of Trio Electric, had actually come to Mike Feinberg, while Mike was at KIPP, and said, we as employers have prioritized certain industry credentials that don’t necessarily speak to a prospective employee’s ability to get to the job site day one and get to work. Oftentimes, these credentials are missing a very important perspective, and voice, and component, which is the employer partner. It’s like when we’re talking about some of the credentials that are recognized like OSHA 10, or NCCO, or the EPA license—you name it. It’s a credential that’s been valued by industry for decades such that it’s now kind of been embraced as the standard. If you have this credential, then it means X, Y, and Z. And while that student may actually know X, Y, and Z, in order to get a lot of these credentials, it’s mostly classroom-based instruction. What employers are looking for on Day 1, or even Day 35, is your ability to translate what you learned via these credentials or via these vocational trainings on to the worksite. And most of what these employers are looking for is the hands-on approach, not the “Can you take a test and pass it?” one.
And so when Beau came to Mike, it was about, “I’m hiring all these people that have all these credentials, and I’m saying, ‘Oh, great, go on to the worksite. And, you know, bend conduit,’ and students are asking, ‘What does that even mean?’” He’s like, “So if I, as the employer, still have to train them, then why are they spending all of these dollars getting trained?” And so, because Beau had started this partnership with KIPP back in the day, and then with Spring Branch ISD, working directly with high school students and seniors, there was no question that Beau would be one of our initial partners. And his approach and our experience with Beau across these last few years, has been our approach with all of the different employer partners that we are now leveraging for our registered apprenticeship model. So what we’re doing is we’re taking the employers that we’re partnering up with and showing them the curriculum, and asking them, “Is this what you need? And if this is not what you need, we’re held accountable to you, because we want this training to lead to a job within your organization or company.” The purpose, again, is not, “Can we can we get people enrolled in classes and graduate them?” It’s, “Can that training prepare them for employment?” And so we’re doing that through our registered apprenticeship model, and we have more partners, like the Trios, like the Galleries, that are doing just that: involving the employer, whether as the training entity or as the partner editing training curriculum, to ensure that it’s translating into something that they’re looking for.
It’s about empowering students to be set up for a smooth transition, whether it’s college and/or the trades.
FF: What do you think the future of WorkTexas and CTE more broadly looks like?
VR: If this were Mike Feinberg that you were interviewing, he’d want to be in every high school and bring WorkTexas’s network of employer partnerships to really inform schools about what it is that industry is looking for. And oftentimes those conversations are left with CTE personnel, but he’s interested in bringing in those that are leading the academic departments within these high schools to talk more broadly about how to connect what the students are learning in classes to what employers are going to be looking for. Again, it’s not about saying, “Oh, you’ve already been placed in this particular track, and you’re going to be doing solely welding.” It’s about empowering students to be set up for a smooth transition, whether it’s college and/or the trades.
While we’ve partnered up with Premier High School here at Gallery Furniture, we’re going to be expanding and integrating within Premier High Schools here in Houston. And Mike’s goal is to serve as a model for other ISDs who are looking to figure out how to integrate CTE. It’s like “CTE plus,” and the plus is the employer partners, the training partners, and how we can make sure that their ideas, perspectives, and feedback are really integrated within what high school students are being taught so that it is setting up these students to make that transition from twelfth grade to plus, whatever the plus is.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.