Growth leads to talk of facility for Ignite program

BENTONVILLE -- Michael Sutera's future is clearer after spending the past year in the School District's Ignite Professional Studies program.

Sutera started in the program's information technology class last fall. His involvement in the class led directly to an internship with RevUnit, a digital product development company. RevUnit liked Sutera enough to offer him a full-time job upon his graduation from West High School next month. He'll be the fourth Ignite alumnus RevUnit has hired full-time.

"We're very particular about the people we hire," said Michael Paladino, RevUnit's co-founder and chief technology officer. "We look for a strong values fit as well as strong technical competency. And the fact we've made [Sutera] an offer is a strong indicator of our confidence in both of those things with him."

Sutera exemplifies what district officials are trying to accomplish with Ignite: help high school students decide what they want to do with their lives by exposing them to careers through real work experiences.

The district is investing heavily in the program, not only in terms of personnel, but also facilities. The School Board last month approved building a facility for Ignite at West High School that's projected to cost $3.6 million.

Superintendent Debbie Jones, addressing more than 400 people who had gathered at Record downtown for a celebration of the program earlier this month, compared Ignite to some of Bentonville's best-known features, such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

"Tonight we celebrate a new landmark in town, Ignite," Jones said.

Facility in the works

Ignite has grown quickly -- from an information technology course of 15 students during the 2015-16 school year to 200 students this school year in courses covering eight career areas. Enrollment is projected to grow to 256 next school year and to 572 by the 2021-22 school year, according to district documents.

Ignite immerses students in real experiences in a professional environment with support from a facilitating teacher and professional mentors. Students also have the opportunity to earn concurrent college credit.

Ignite is approaching the end of its third year. By the end of it, Ignite students will have earned 1,000 hours of college credit and served more than 20,000 hours in internships, said director Teresa Hudson.

Operational costs this school year for Ignite total about $823,000, with $665,380 going toward personnel costs. Included in that is Hudson's salary of $82,014, according to district documents.

The average class size is about 20, Hudson said. Arkansas allows public high schools a maximum of 30 students per academic class.

Ignite classes meet in various places depending on their needs. The district is spending $26,365 this year to rent spaces for some classes, such as at Northwest Arkansas Community College and the University of Arkansas Global Campus in Rogers.

Ignite classes take place outside the schools to expose students to real-world, professional environments. There were only a few available spaces companies were willing to share for free, Hudson said.

The board voted 6-1 on March 12 in favor of district administrators' recommendation to build a facility dedicated solely to Ignite at West High School. The project is expected to add about 20,000 square feet to the school.

Rebecca Powers voted against it. She told the board prior to the vote while she supports Ignite, she had trouble with the facility's estimated $3.6 million price tag.

For the sake of comparison, the district is building its next elementary school -- scheduled to open next year -- at a maximum cost of $24.3 million. It will be about 91,500 square feet.

"When I vote no tonight, it's not because I don't love the Ignite program," Powers said during the March 12 meeting. "It is not because I don't want to be uniform with the rest of the board. It's strictly because I think we could be more frugal."

Brent Leas, a board member, said he was puzzled by Powers' vote. The Ignite facility and its projected cost had been discussed even before the district proposed a 1.9-mill tax increase voters approved in May, he said.

"I think what's been presented is a plan that really elevates Ignite to that stature it should be at," Leas said.

Leas also pointed out the Centerton location is better than other sites that had been discussed for students from western Benton County -- particularly those in Gravette, Gentry and Decatur -- who wish to participate in Ignite.

The Bentonville, Decatur, Gentry and Gravette districts discussed building and jointly operating a career center. The plan lost momentum last fall, however, when the Bentonville School Board balked at the building's projected price tag of $21 million. Bentonville had considered the career center a potential home for Ignite.

The board still must approve the final price for the Ignite facility once it's presented. January 2020 is the target date for the project's completion.

Ignite's culinary class will continue to meet at Brightwater: A Center for the Study of Food, Northwest Arkansas Community College's culinary center. The rest of the classes will meet at the Ignite facility. That will facilitate collaboration among the career strands, Hudson said.

Hight Jackson Associates of Rogers is the architectural firm, and Flintco is the construction management firm that will be working on the facility. They are in the programming phase of the project, determining specific needs for each of Ignite's classes, Hudson said.

Real work

Sutera, 17, joined Ignite's information technology class last year. Fourteen of his classmates ended up doing internships with Walmart Inc. Sutera wanted a smaller atmosphere, so he asked instructor John Mark Russell to connect him with RevUnit.

Sutera started working eight hours per week at RevUnit as an Ignite student in October. About a month ago, RevUnit began paying him to spend additional time there in the afternoons, outside of the unpaid internship he's required to do there for his class. That part-time job will convert to full-time after Sutera graduates.

He's spent his time working on an internal project that will be used daily by almost everyone in the company, Paladino said.

"This is a real project that needed to get done. It just didn't have a specific deadline associated with it," Paladino said.

Sutera said it's been an "awesome" experience working closely with RevUnit workers, who he said have treated him with nothing but respect.

"They're always up to date with the current technology, so coming here and learning in this environment is so much more valuable to me than learning in a school environment," Sutera said.

Sutera always has been interested in the technology field, but his time in Ignite and with RevUnit confirmed it's the right career for him.

"I was able to figure out that, yeah, I do want to be a programmer, and I enjoy sitting down and writing code for eight hours a day, which not a lot of people can say," he said. "But I was able to find it out before I went to college and got a degree for something I might not have ended up liking later in life."

Sutera was one of 136 students from Arkansas named semifinalists in this year's National Merit Scholarship Program. That distinction alone makes him coveted by colleges and universities across the country.

Sutera still intends to pursue a degree in computer science, but he's putting his RevUnit job first. He'll enroll at Northwest Arkansas Community College while he works and see how many classes he can juggle, he said.

The district doesn't have data on the post-secondary options Ignite graduates pursue, but students are choosing everything from part-time or full-time employment to a two-year or four-year college, Hudson said. She estimated at least 90 percent are finding jobs or attending college for further study in the same careers they explored in Ignite.

Paladino said he admires and advocates for the Ignite program, not only because of the experiences it provides students, but also what it means for businesses like his.

"It truly is a talent pipeline that enables us to be able to continue to grow and scale our business," he said.

Mike Harvey, chief operating officer for the Northwest Arkansas Council, said Ignite has relied on the council for help aligning programs with the needs of employers in the region, he said.

"I'm a big fan of what they're doing," Harvey said about Ignite. "They've done it deliberately and done it right, rolling it out in phases."

Ignite is one of several career programs started by area school districts within the past few years that represent big steps forward for the region, because they are addressing worker shortages in certain fields, Harvey said. He mentioned the Career Academy of Siloam Springs and the Pea Ridge Manufacturing and Business Academy as other examples.

"Collectively, they're really going to put a dent in the shortages we have," he said. "We're not there yet, but these are all huge steps in the right direction for us as a region."

Learning new skills

A mile east of RevUnit is Brightwater, the community college's culinary center, where 13 students from Ignite's culinary class meet.

Students covered the basics during the first semester: food safety and sanitation methods, knife skills and cooking stocks. Sauces, basic cooking techniques and nutrition are covered in the second semester, said Phil Dreshfield, instructor.

"But they've also learned what I call the soft employability skills," Dreshfield said. "They understand teamwork. They all have communication skills now. They understand kitchen cleanliness, they understand personal hygiene. Those are key elements that we occasionally don't see with college students entering our program."

Some of Ignite's culinary students are getting jobs simply because of their association with Brightwater, he said.

Scotty Cowan, 18, is a Bentonville High School senior voted student of the year by his culinary classmates. His longtime interest in cooking prompted him to enroll in the culinary class last year. He said he much prefers the hands-on work Ignite emphasizes as opposed to listening to lectures in a classroom.

Cowan works part-time for Brightwater cooking for the food truck -- nicknamed "Beast-ro" -- that serves as a mobile learning laboratory. He's the first student chosen from Ignite to work for Brightwater. Dreshfield also helped land Cowan a part-time job last semester at the Two 25 Gallery & Wine Bar on South Main Street.

"I like food. I like eating it, but I like creating it, too," Cowan said. "It's an art. It's not just a chore."

Cowan said he wasn't certain what he wanted to do with his life before entering Ignite. Now he knows he wants to be a chef and someday open his own restaurant, likely right here in Northwest Arkansas.

The ways in which Ignite students acquire work experience varies by career field.

Construction students, for example, go out in groups and build things together. Digital design and photography students often get assigned short-term projects for different clients. Medical students engage in job shadowing; they don't get to practice on patients, but they do get to see professionals do it, Hudson said.

"The whole idea is they are having that true experience working with professionals in what they're studying," she said.

Jessica Johnson, a senior at West High School, is part of Ignite's video production class. Johnson, 18, said the experience provided a lot of life lessons students normally don't get out of school. It also provided connections to professionals in the field and taught students how to use some of the newest technology.

Johnson plans to skip college, at least for now, and go straight into the workforce. She hopes to use the skills she acquired with Ignite to land a job with a production studio.

She encouraged anyone looking into Ignite to try it, even if they're not completely sure about it.

"What's the worst that could happen?" she said, "You figure out you don't want to go after that degree you thought you did, and you don't spend a lot of money on it."

NW News on 04/29/2018