Students from Salisbury High School’s BEST (Basic Education Students in Transition) have been visiting Catawba College’s campus during fall semester, assisting with on-campus recycling efforts. These students, all of whom take part in a program called Community Based Vocation Instruction, are learning work habits, gaining skills and determining job interests in an effort to become competitively employed in the community.
The students, Tyrone Rankin, Tyler Lingle and Adam Allison, assist Catawba’s Office of Waste Reduction and Reycling each Thursday morning in the campus recycling program. Accompanied on their weekly trips to campus by their teacher and college alumna, Dena Najarian ’93, they pull materials to be recycled from offices in the Hedrick Administration Building.
“Coming to Catawba gives these students a chance to learn new skills that they will use when they move into the workforce in a competitive work environment,” Najarian says. “They’re learning basic skills such as being able to communicate with the public and co-workers, how to handle themselves in the work environment, how to monitor themselves in a work environment, stamina and how to clock in and out at the work place. These basic skills are things that most of us take for granted, but they are a big deal for these students, and helping them learn these skills makes them employable.”
Najarian explains that the process begins with a community base where students get involved in vocation rehabilitation as early as age 14. Students are involved in making a career choice that is right for them. Those students who are evaluated as having the skills to compete for employment become independent and productive members of society when they are employed in the community, she notes. Those students who are unable to meet the competitive requirements to enter the workforce upon finishing high school go on to further training and skill development with Rowan Vocational Opportunities.
“Seeing my students master a skill, navigate a work environment and become independent in the execution of a particular job is very rewarding for me,” she explains. “Sometimes you don’t know if they’re going to be able to do it or not or be successful, and when they are, it makes you feel good because you know you were a part of it.”
Employers who are interested in working with students enrolled in the BEST program and becoming a site for Community Based Instruction, should call Salisbury High School at 704-636-1221, ext. 445.