Hands-on Experience Whets Students' Appetites

At the Career & Technical Education Center, culinary arts students don’t just sit in class and listen to lectures; they run a full-service, upscale restaurant. And they’re not the only high schoolers in the Frisco Independent School District who learn by doing professional-grade work.

The center, along with other career and technical education programs across the country, focuses on making learning as collaborative as possible and gives students real-life projects that prepare them for the workforce.

“It’s all about taking academically rigorous concepts and making them personally relevant to our students,” said Wes Cunningham, the principal of the center.

Whether they’re working in the restaurant, creating marketing material for businesses or becoming certified in industry-standard editing software, the students who take advanced classes at the center are applying what they learn. They continue to take classes at their home campus and are involved in student groups and other activities while they learn skills that they will need for different careers.

The center’s students scored higher on Texas standardized tests than the Frisco ISD average, and enrollment has increased from 1,000 to nearly 1,600 this fall.

Of about 450 students who graduated last year, 93 percent said they were attending college this fall; 4 percent were going to a technical school or straight into the vocation that they studied; and 3 percent were undecided.

The point of the program, Cunningham said, is to give them a chance to experience what it would be like to work in a field they’re interested in, and through that experience, they can choose whether that field is right for them.