S3,E19 - Dan Straub and Erin Noto

This is Talk CNY, a semi-monthly podcast by CenterState CEO. We're an independent nonprofit committed to creating inclusive, equitable and sustainable economic growth in Central New York. Join us as we meet the people and explore the projects driving the regional economy forward. This is Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank. I'm Katie Zilcosky, Director of Communications at CenterState CEO and your host for Talk CNY. The regional Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics or STEAM school welcomed its first group of students at the start of this school year. It's a major accomplishment. It's the first school of its kind in the region, and it brings the Central Tech building back to life in downtown Syracuse. The project itself brought together numerous partners across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to create a school that will help us meet this moment here in Central New York. On this episode of Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank, we are joined by STEAM School Principal Dan Straub and Syracuse City School District's Executive Director of Career and Technical Education Erin Noto.

Dan, Erin, thank you both so much for being here today.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you for having us.

So the regional STEAM school has its first students through the doors taking classes. Can you tell me a little bit about what it's been like so far? What are some of your first impressions on the start of this new school year?

Well, I mean it is been a long time coming, and it has come to fruition. We are so excited. Obviously, the historic building in itself is amazing. Minerva, the kids come in, they see Minerva every single day just like they did 122 years ago. To bring that history to life has been something else. The kids have been absolutely amazing. Kids have been absolutely amazing. The staff have been incredible and the vision of what this was supposed to be 5, 6, 7 years ago when former superintendent Dr. Manning jumped on board and bring industry involved, it is really come to fruition. The amount of collaborators just from the district, from Erin's department of CTE and the state getting the curriculum approved, the CTE pathways, and we're seeing it and we're seeing now, for example, today, the students, John Liddy toured the students and they were actually working with him over at INSPYRE, and the kids had an absolutely amazing time.

He was in two weeks ago to do a presentation and gave the kids a little challenge. They came over today, our business entrepreneurship pathway, and they worked with him for an hour and a half after touring the building at INSPYRE and to see what it's all about. They're now creating business cards and networking is happening and this is ninth graders, these are 14-year-olds going on 15. And every pathway - we're going to have that. Every month someone comes in and then we go out and we work on challenges that industry presents to the kids and for those kids, ninth graders to develop these skills as 14 and 15-year-olds going to these collaborators is something else to see starting this early in developing those skills, those critical thinking skills, communication skills, skills that cross every pathway and every age in life just, and it is coming to fruition and we're seeing it before our eyes happening. So it is so special.

Yeah, I definitely want to talk more about the pathways. I mean the STEAM school is definitely a little different from what people might think of when they think of a typical high school curriculum. You have a number of concentrations and those concentrations can offer up to 30 credits that go towards a college career potentially. So can you tell me a little bit more about what those concentrations are, Dan? You mentioned the business and entrepreneurship concentration, but I know there's a number of others. Erin, can you share a little bit more with me, and tell me why did you choose those concentrations for this school?

Absolutely. So we have Dan, there's there's seven, so I always leave one off for some reason. It always happens. But there's Movie, Music and Theater, Backstage Production, Robotics and Automation. There's Animation and Game Design, Business Entrepreneurship, Construction Management, Data Analytics and Computer Chip Technology and Production. And so those seven pathways, of course, I can't leave off all of the Visual and Performing arts, which include vocal, instrumental and dance. We will be looking at and making that a CTE pathway as the state expands their CTE options for kids across New York State. So there's work to be done there as well. So these programs in general, career and technical education, for those who don't know CTE, career and Technical Education, anytime that we look at developing a program, and this is for every CTE person across the state, it's not a random selection of developing a program.

It takes time, it takes experts, and it takes data to inform our decision. So CenterState CEO has been the driving factor of what industry is coming around the corner, what's happening, and not just locally here regionally, but also in the state and also nationwide. So the development of a career and technical education pathway has to take all those factors into place in order to be developed. So once the data shows that there's a need or there's going to be an increase or there's going to be a huge deficit in that particular pathway of work, then we start looking at developing a program. And as you mentioned, the curriculums are very, the state does not dictate what the curriculums look like because in each region or each area, that industry and that pathway is going to look different, where it is that you live. Barbering might look different in Syracuse as compared to what it looks like in New York City.

So the curriculums are developed with our industry partners. So the development of these particular pathways and these programs in the STEAM building took years to create. Dr. Manning worked with CenterState CEO to garner that data, what was going to be happening for these kids coming up and then reached out and connected with so many business and industry partners in our region to sit down in a room. This is how it happened. They sat down in a room, our curriculum writers came, who are former teachers, came who understand what pedagogy is, who understand what it is to develop a curriculum to develop lesson plans and unit plans. And they just smattered ideas all over the wall with a chart paper. And so really what is it important? What do these kids need to do? How do we make sure that we're meeting kids where they're at?

Does a kid want to go right into the workforce after they've completed this program? And if so, what would that curriculum look like? Does a kid want to go into a trade school, or do they want to go into the military? And if that's so what does that off ramp look like? Or does a kid want to go to a two-year or four-year school after the completion of this program and what does that curriculum look like? So it took years to develop these pathways and these curriculums, and it wouldn't have happened, it would've never have occurred if it wasn't for CenterState CEO and all of our business industry partners who came in and told us what we needed to do in order to prepare our students for those three different off-ramps.

You mentioned the collaboration aspect of the STEAM school. It's played a huge role in the entire planning process. You've brought together partners from across public, private, nonprofit sector. So it's really taken the whole community to get this school to open its doors and welcome its students for this first school year. Can you tell me a little bit about why partnership, a little bit more about why partnership is so important to this school and in this process?

So as Dan said, when he opened up having that real world, meeting people, making connections, having relationships with people is really the first part of the work that we do in current technical education. I just want to say for the record, the STEAM High School is the third high school in the district that is a full CTE building. In addition to that, we also have CTE options available to all of our kids in Corcoran, Nottingham, and Henninger. And the other two full CTE buildings are ITC and PSLA. So the district has recognized the commitment to career and technical education and the importance of it. And that starts in ninth grade. So those 14-year-olds are starting to develop relationships with people who live in their community with business and industries who are founded here in this particular region when they're 14. So the vision is in hopes by the time they get to be 18, they have made connections with people from across the region, from across the state and their pathway, and they've filtered out what it is they want to do, which is just as important to figure out what it is they don't want to do.

And if they want to go into that next step, that relationship piece is already there. Think about who you were when you were 14-years-old and the development that you had from 14 to 18 from freshman year to senior year. And just by exposing students to the availability of all the things that are possible in this pathway, in this vein of work, is really what we want them to do. And ultimately, we want them to stay here. We want them to stay here and have not just a job, but we want them to have a career, and we want them to have a career that is going to sustain having them have a family here and growing their families here and rebuilding and building the communities in the Syracuse area. So that's really the ultimate goal of the work that we do with the business industry, with our post-secondary partners, with the school system, its just it takes everyone to get that work done and no one's doing it alone. So in order to have real rigorous, relevant programming, we all have to work together and recognize that our kids are amazing and they can do whatever they want to do. We have to remove those barriers and provide those opportunities for them.

And Erin beautifully said there, and I remember Robert Simpson listened to him a bunch of times and he said back in the sixties and seventies, it was a one or two company town and when they moved away, we saw the results in the eighties and nineties. I've never seen Syracuse. I've been there my whole life. I've never seen any more construction going on. What they're building here in the city is these businesses and companies coming in where it's sustainable. It is sustainable. And some even the big boys come in town. Live Nation is in town and our backstage production is working with them, collaborating with them. And we just want time and expertise, time and expertise, and the amount of collaborators involved. We have over 80 now.

Now, absolutely, some would give us money, but really all we're asking for time and expertise because we're growing our workforce because at the end of the day, these companies are going to need workers. And if they can get them early on and offer internships junior, senior year throughout college or they can really, it's a value added so they can go to college. If they want to go to college, go to college, but least they'll have that background with semiconductor or engineering robotics, and then they can go pursue a degree or they can walk right into the field with stackable credentials. They're not working in now starting as a low entry level, you have these credentials behind you, structure management, where you can start with a construction company who are, the construction companies are great we're working with. They always talking, 'Hey, we're getting older, we're getting older. We need people.'

In construction management or the Procore and obviously CNF and Turner and some of these really big companies or a Tiny Home for Good, which is kind of the smaller. Andrew's great. Just to kind of see blueprints and designs and what's a project look like from the start to the end. And a lot of kids will experience that through our four-year program. And if they wanted to go there, then they can jump into a job or they might want to go pursue a degree with that background and those credentials. So it's just value added. CTE. I come from a high school that started a couple CTE programs the last couple years. I was there at Corcoran High School, and I saw how the CTE kids were engaged. I mean, they were truly engaged and they all graduated and some went to the union, some went to college with a welding background. But regardless, it gave that engagement, it gave that hook to come to school where some kids don't have that hook, whether it's sports or clubs or drama. Some kids don't do that. And then CTE allows that hook and that engagement and that obviously opportunity to see what's out there.

Now can you tell me a little bit more about the value for the students? I mean for students, you mentioned the CTE students can be engaged in new ways and maybe traditional coursework wouldn't offer them. What value is it to have this school, this state-of-the-art, great curriculum, beautiful building for students interested in these pathways?

I think what it does is it gives our kids a competitive advantage, whatever off-ramp they're looking at. So every program, because they're approved CTE Pathways has to have a college articulation. So we have to work with our post industry folks in order to make sure that we're in alignment with a pathway at the post-secondary level. So every program has to have that. In addition to that, we are also required to have what's called an employability profile, where our business industry partners and collaborators come in and say, these are the skills that I am looking for in someone to come into this field. And that employability profile starts in ninth grade, and they have to assess the students, how are you doing with hand tools? How are you doing with navigating blueprints, and what is your level? And of course, we're always hoping that the kids are mastering those skills because our CTE programming, again across the district are required to have two meetings a year, one in the fall and one in the spring to make sure that we're staying relevant to what's happening in the business and industry.

The curriculum, it's been crosswalk with other academic curriculum, so math, science, social studies, and English. So they're getting, that's embedded into the work that's being done in their CTE class. They're also getting career in financial management. I wish someone had given me the career in financial management class when I was in high school, how to be a financially responsible adult. And so those things are being taught by our CTE teachers. And I preach it all the time, and I know it's because I'm passionate about it. And it was because I was a CTE kid and my dad was a CTE teacher. But CTE instructors and the opportunities that we give to CTE people, it's doing school differently. It's getting them engaged, it's getting them the hands-on activities that many of our kids' brains need to do. It's creating problem solvers and critical thinkers and how to work with a team, which as you know is not easy when you're a grown-up and you're an adult.

So why wouldn't we want to start cultivating those experiences and that work when they're young and that we can expose them to the things that they're going to see out in the next step of their lives. So I think the value added, the competitive advantage of career and technical education is exponential. And I think the misnomer is that these CTE programs that used to exist are for kids that are less than, and that's not true. It's rigorous. They have the 30 college credits that they're going to be able to have the opportunity to take. And graduating from these programs is like getting an Advanced Regents diploma. The New York State Department of Education has finally recognized that it is relevant, and it's something that is going to help our communities build respectable, informed, intelligent young people to go out into the world. And that's really what we're hoping for.

It is also important to note the students are taking English social studies, math, science, right? They're taking their comprehensive high school courses that they need. And obviously as they grow 10th, 11th, 12th grade, they'll be taking more electives and higher-level classes. What's important, the way we scheduled it is we allow teachers to meet with CTE teachers and they plan, and they know the teachers actually know what's going on in the CTE classes. So when they're planning units and project-based learning, they can incorporate science into what the kids are doing offsite or they can incorporate English with animation games, say podcasting or social studies. Obviously, history's is all around and how you bring technology into that. So it's important to note that the content teachers are involved with this, involved with CTE, and they know what's going on and make it relevant to what the students are doing in their life, especially at school. So there's relevancy there as well.

We have much more to talk about. But we're going to take a quick break for a word from our presenting sponsor NBT Bank.

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This is Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank. I'm Katie Zilcosky, Director of Communications at CenterState CEO, and your host for Talk CNY. We are joined on this episode today by Syracuse City School District's Executive Director of Career and Technical Education, or CTE, which you'll hear a lot in this episode, Erin Noto and the Regional STEAM School principal, Dan Straub. Thank you both for being here today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We mentioned it a little bit at the top, but this building that the STEAM School is in is a building designed by Archimedes Russell in 1899 with some really, really gorgeous architectural details. What's it like to be in a building like that and welcoming students in and bringing it back to life. A building that was empty for years in downtown Syracuse?

Well, I mean, for me, it's very cool because everyone I talked to, well, my grandmother graduated here in 1924.

That's amazing.

But every person, every community member, they either have an uncle, aunt, grandparent that went here or they know somebody that graduated from Central Tech or Central High School before that. And we had a reunion back in September, last September, about 90 people showed up. And it is cool in the sense that they kind of feel forgotten and they want to bring, they said everyone remembers Corcoran and Henninger. Obviously, those are schools exist right now, but Central Tech no one talks about because it is kind of lost. So I'm like, well, we're bringing that back. We're bringing that back, the mascot and sports and the colors. It was kind of a combination of let's get people ideas, and we're going to hold a big reunion here in a few months. But they want to get in. They want everybody's excited to see it. The stairwells still exists. The marble. It is magnificent. It's a magnificent building. The auditorium is a gem, and when it's ready, it's going to blow everybody away, just the sight of it. So it is really exciting, and the community's excited about it, and it is an unbelievably nice, beautiful old building.

I think what I think about the most is that it's a beautiful juxtaposition between the old and the new. So you walk into the main doors, beautiful marble staircase. I mean, you feel it's beautiful. I mean, you feel like it's just such a beautiful place to be in. And then you go down the hallway and you're in a state-of-the-art robotics lab. So it's that old, beautiful architecture balanced by the fact that you have the state-of-the-art, probably never seen before, lab for high school students to use. And I think it's a testament of where we were and where we're going. And I just think that that is an amazing opportunity for our kids and our community and for all of our career and technical education programs across the district that they have the opportunities to have these labs that are state-of-the-art. All of our CTE kids have that opportunity, not just the kids at STEAM. And so I'm very proud of the fact that our district is so committed to ensuring that we're industry standard. And so for STEAM in particular, when you walk in and you see the old versus new, I think it's a really cool juxtaposition. And this project, I've never seen county and city and schools and superintendent and mayor, I mean everyone just coming together and collaborating, OCM Boces with SCSC, you get county students. It has been a massive project and it's here and it's now, and obviously it's still being completed, but really you can see it now. You can feel it, and families can do the same. So once open houses come around and CTE open houses, I mean, we're excited to get people in and kind of see what's going on and seeing the results of seven years of really labor and putting this all together on everyone's side.

Yeah, I mean the building itself is in a part of downtown that's seeing a lot of development and redevelopment. You have the CHIMES building under construction right now, Salt City Market in the past five years. You have the Hotel Syracuse, which was refurbished and reopened, and we at CenterState just finished the INSPYRE Innovation Hub, which you guys talked about at the top of the show. So how do you see the STEAM School fitting into all this other redevelopment really within walking distance of where your students are taking classes?

I mean, location couldn't be better for us. Dr. Manning would joke around. It is a playground. We're in the middle of the playground right now because I mean Red House down, so Syracuse Stage and Salt City, and INSPYRE. So many businesses, SU, I mean so many businesses in the hospital, the drones and the automation, it is everything that's coming in the future and now, but especially the next five to 10 years or so. The vision was it is going to explode down here. I mean, it's happening right now. We've seen it before our eyes, the building in Syracuse, and we're going to be part of that. And I'm excited about that. I'm excited that the kids will have an opportunity to not only have the access, but the opportunity to work with these industry and hospitals and colleges right here, right downtown. So it's exciting.

And you mentioned you're planning five, 10 years in the future. So if you both could just share with me to wrap up, where do you hope to see this STEAM School and its students five to 10 years in the future? How do you hope they find success?

For me, I would say this for all of our students, I want them to feel supported in whatever step is next. I want them to look back and say, gosh, I was given so many opportunities and barriers were removed, and I was able to do X, Y, Z because I was given this opportunity. So I think that from the district level, not necessarily just dedicated to a building for all of our students in Syracuse City School district, CTE included, that the district is working really hard to ensure that we're providing well-rounded human beings out into the world and whatever step that may be, and that they can look back and say that the district did their due diligence and made sure that we were innovative and creative and really trying to get them to wherever they wanted to go for the next step. That's what I hope for our students and their families.

And like Erin said, opportunity and access. If you look back five to 10 years and a kid says, 'You know what? I was given the opportunity, networking ability, communication skills, and resume building to go and to come home.' If they go away or stay home, stay in Syracuse with what's coming out the next 10 years, with the different fields and the automation. It is crazy to think about what, it's going to be like 10 years from now, just the way technology is moving. But seeing that they have a facility and a building like this, and to get in here and to use and advocate for themselves and take ownership is one of the big same way we talk about all the time and getting help and advice and mentorship to get to the next level and what they want to do. That to me is success more than anything on paper is just kind of someone feels good about it and proud that they want to STEAM high school. I think that's the most success.

Well, Dan Erin, thank you both so much for your time today, and best of luck with the rest of the first school year.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having us. It was our pleasure to be here today.

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