School-to-Career Meeting Achieves Goals

School-to-Career Meeting Achieves Goals

Labor and Education Leaders Meet at Teamsters Skills For Tomorrow Meeting in December

December 22, 2003

In addition to Teamster locals being honored for outstanding School-to-Career programs, union and education leaders gathered in Washington, D.C. in early December for a Skills For TomorrowProject Partners Meeting. The two-day program included awards presented by Teamsters’ General President James Hoffa, who stressed the importance of expanding the Skills For Tomorrowinitiative.

Skills for Tomorrowbegan as a collaborative endeavor of the Teamsters Education Department, the Minnesota Teamsters Service Bureau, and the U.S. Department of Labor in October of 1999, as a way to share school-to-work practices and models that Teamster locals and Joint Councils have implemented with various educational institutions around the country. The main focus of the program is to provide young people with knowledge of unions and workers’ rights, and establish pathways into meaningful high-wage careers.

“At the meeting, we wanted to strengthen the interaction and relationships among partners in this project. We achieved that,” said Mary G. Hardiman, Teamsters Director of Education. “The attendees shared their successes, while also obtaining useful labor studies information. In addition, they discussed the value of developing programs to improve workers’ skills, and brain-stormed ways to enhance school-to-career programs for students.”

Education experts and union leaders in attendance included the following:

• Jewell Gould, Director of Research and Information Services at the American Federation of Teachers;
• Paul Cole, Secretary-Treasurer of the New York State AFL-CIO and Executive Director of the American Labor Studies Center;
• Tracy Chang, Assistant Professor at the Center for Labor Education and Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham;
• Shirley McCall, Coordinator of the TransTech Academy at Francis L. Cardozo Senior High School in Washington, D.C.;
• Judy Ancel, Director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri Kansas City;
• Jean Dunn, Executive Director of the Minnesota Teamsters Service Bureau;
• Daniel Rulli, Education Specialist with the National Archives and Records Administration;
• Laurie Kominsky, Director of the Youth Project for the UCLA Occupational Safety and Health;
• Tess Tiernan, Director of the Skills for Tomorrow High School in St. Paul, Minnesota; and
• Martin Taylor, Program Coordinator for the Building Futures Project, Washington Metropolitan Council of the AFL-CIO.

On the final day of the meeting, students from the TransTech Academy in Washington, DC provided examples of how their experiences in a specially-tailored high school program will facilitate their transition from education to employment.