Gazebo Gazette
Pass Christian High School FCCLA, Mississippi, was selected as the 2023 National High School Career Connection Award Winner, sponsored by Goodheart-Wilcox Publisher and Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) for their project “Creating Connections.”
Career Connection is a peer education program created by FCCLA, designed to teach students how to prepare for career success now and in the future. The award recognizes chapters that conduct career development projects to help students build skills for success in their families, careers, and communities.
As the National High School Winner, the Pass Christian High School FCCLA chapter will receive a $1,000 award and be recognized at the 2023 FCCLA National Leadership Conference, July 2 – 6, 2023, in Denver, Colorado.
Several FCCLA members including Claire Dahlike, Aria Grady, Reese Miller and Sarah Taylor worked on the Career Connection project called “Creating Connections.”
With the goal of providing real world career examples, providing connections between our students and community leaders, and bringing community leaders into our school students linked careers and community members to classes and class standards. These career representatives were invited into our Family and Consumer Science classes to discuss the linked class standards, how they got into their career field, what the daily activities were in their career and anything else they thought was important to share with students about their career.
Two examples of this process was inviting O’Hara the CEO of the Better Business Bureau Serving Mississippi to discuss the standard “identify a consumer’s rights and responsibilities and evaluate consumer information” with the Resource Management class or Alicia Tarrant the Youth Outreach Educator for the Gulf Coast Center of Nonviolence, Inc to discuss the standards “identify types of domestic violence, discuss warning signs of violence and identify preventive measures and intervention skills” with the Family Dynamics class.
Students filled out guest speaker evaluation forms and this data was shared with guest speakers. A rotation was created for all students to be able to write thank you cards to various guest speakers. This project created a number of partnerships and collaborations.
Every community leader who was a guest speaker has become a long-term partnership that has worked with us to help make this project impactful and had joined our Family and Consumer Science Advisory Board which helps build and guides our program in the future.
Through this project students learned and used valuable skills including communication, teamwork, business etiquette, organization and more.
Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) is a dynamic and effective national student organization that helps young men and women become leaders and address important personal, family, work, and societal issues through Family and Consumer Sciences education.
Experts in Career and Technical Education, Goodheart-Willcox was established in 1921 and has continually published the highest quality content for CTE. Subject areas include Family and Consumer Sciences; Business, Marketing, and Career Education; Health and Health Sciences; Automotive; Technical, Trades, and Engineering; and Agricultural Education.
