This story is part of Hechinger’s ongoing coverage about rethinking high school. See our article about a new diploma in Alabama that trades chemistry for carpentry.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — It had been a slow morning at the Class Act Federal Credit Union. But a little after 11 a.m., a client walked through the door.
“Who’s waiting on me?” said the elderly man, smiling.
“I will,” said Gracie Lacefield, one of three tellers behind the counter. “How are you doing? What can I help you with?” The man gave his account information to Lacefield, and then handed her his money to deposit.
The Class Act Federal Credit Union isn’t a typical bank. It’s run by Jefferson County Public Schools, and Lacefield and the two other tellers are high schoolers.
The credit union is one small piece of a districtwide effort, Academies of Louisville, to embed career and technical education, or CTE, alongside core subjects like math and English and require every student to pick a career pathway by 10th grade. Piloted in 2017 at 11 high schools, the model has expanded to all 15 of the district’s main high schools. As part of that effort, the district has also launched a career exploration program at 14 middle schools, partnered with local colleges and universities to provide dual credit courses and smoothed the path for students to graduate with industry-recognized certifications.
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The Academies of Louisville is one of roughly 30 such programs that are working to provide CTE for all students, regardless of whether they plan to go to college or directly into the workforce, according to Jessica Delgado, marketing and communications director of Ford Next Generation Learning, which supports school districts in adopting the approach. This “CTE for all” model has grown in popularity as support for the idea of “college for all” has eroded amid high tuition costs and low completion rates. The “CTE for all” model has support from employers interested in meeting local and regional workforce needs. And some experts argue that combining workforce and academic learning makes students more engaged and helps them build professional networks.
“A lack of access to work-based learning can actually limit the career prospects and economic mobility of youth and adults,” said Kyle Hartung, associate vice president for education at the nonprofit Jobs for the Future. He noted that there’s some evidence for the effectiveness of individual “CTE for all” programs and models, although data on the impact of the approach as a whole remains scant.
Meanwhile, the career academies model requires a significant overhaul of the traditional high school model, and without buy-in from teachers, families and local and regional business leaders, it’s unlikely to work. In late November, Anchorage School District in Alaska postponed fully adopting the model after parents and school board members raised concerns about shorter class periods and the possibility that some core subjects would be replaced by career-themed courses.
Related: The path to a career could start in middle school
For Marty Pollio, now Jefferson County Public Schools superintendent, the inspiration to adopt career-oriented education sprouted from a desire to engage more students in learning. He remembers as principal of Jeffersontown High School in early 2010 walking into a chemistry class to find one of the students asleep.
After Pollio woke him up, the student explained that he didn’t care about the class and asked why he had to learn about the periodic table. Next period, the same student was attentive and engaged in the school’s welding lab, Pollio said, even as the class talked about some of the same content the chemistry class had covered.
“We have a kid who has a passion for welding, why are we not teaching science from that perspective? Why are we not teaching math from that perspective?” Pollio recalled thinking. He encouraged his teachers to experiment and collaborate to find real-world applications for lessons. To help make science lessons more concrete, for example, the chemistry teacher began holding her class in the welding lab and both the chemistry and welding teachers began interweaving projects and lessons into each other’s classes.
Around that time, the district was seeking to expose more students to career pathways, especially after the state legislature in 2011 expanded how it evaluates schools to include students’ career readiness, a metric it has continued to refine since. In 2014, the city of Louisville was designated a Ford Next Generation Learning Community, and it joined the network of school districts that intend to provide CTE for all students. In 2016, Jefferson County leaders and principals, including Pollio, visited nearby Nashville, one of the first cities to launch the career academies model.
Adopting the model in Louisville required a shake-up of how the schools were organized: Every school created a freshman academy and two to three career academies, each with a designated principal and counselor (in addition to the schoolwide executive principal).
Today, across the 15 high schools, there are 56 academies offering a total of 155 different industry pathways. As freshmen, students are introduced to each career pathway available at their high school before selecting one. Sophomore year, students start taking career courses in their chosen pathway, getting hands-on education.
Depending on the pathway, students earn either an industry certification or college credit through local postsecondary institutions such as Jefferson Community and Technical College. Students from the same academy also move through the majority of their core classes together, when possible.
At Jeffersontown High, for example, students can join one of three academies: business and leadership, build and design, or the health sciences. Within those academies, students specialize in an industry pathway like engineering, teaching and learning, welding, allied health or marketing. Students in the business and leadership academy’s financial services pathway can work at their campus Class Act Credit Union. The bank was founded by Jefferson County employees in 1954, to provide educators with financial services, and began to set up branches in high schools in 2011 as a way to offer students work-based learning. Other schools offer pathways in fields including healthcare, aviation, manufacturing, computer science, civil service and media arts.
The program looks a little different at every school, said Kim Morales, an executive administrator of high schools for the district. Some combine instruction in core subjects like math with career instruction while others take a less integrated approach, she said.
Related: States bet big on career education, but struggle to show it works
Fern Creek High School is among the schools that have tried the combination approach. On a Tuesday morning in late December, in the school’s engineering lab, students were building robotic cars they’d spent months designing.
Down the hall, a computer science class was reminiscent of a real-world software development company — students worked in teams as lead developers, software developers, business analysts and technical writers for a class project. A few doors down, students in the fire science pathway were creating budgets for how to invest $2,000 to expand either the fire science program or the fire department. Students would present their plans to the Fern Creek Fire Department later in the semester.
Upstairs, juniors in the early education pathway had just completed a lesson on the characteristics needed for effective early childhood educators and had started to work on the professional resumes they’d need to land internships or part-time jobs at child care centers and preschools that partner with the district. Elsewhere in the school, culinary students studied for a certification exam, while students in the JROTC pathway practiced with air rifles for an upcoming drill competition.
Ryan Scott, who teaches biology and Advanced Placement Biology within the high school’s engineering, computer sciences and skilled trades academy, said the academy model requires core content teachers like him to be more flexible and creative. It can also help them focus their attention on certain content because their students tend to have shared interests, he said: “I can draw specific examples from computer science, from fire science, from plumbing, to teach my biology kids things, and it gives me kind of like an anchor point.”
In an ecology unit on how ecosystems change over time, for example, Scott said he talked with his fire science students about the impact of forest fires on an ecosystem, and how sometimes firefighters use burning in specific areas to regenerate land.
Sara Abell, a former Advanced Placement teacher who now leads the academies at Fern Creek, said her thinking on whether students need college has morphed over time. “We need to make sure that we’re preparing all of our students, and college isn’t for everybody,” she said. “Kids don’t need to go to college and waste a bunch of money just to figure out that this isn’t for them and that they could have done something in a skilled trade.”
Students say the focus on career education has shaped them in different ways. Parker Bowdy, a senior in Fern Creek’s fire science pathway, had planned to join a fire department directly after graduation. But recently he said he’s considering college because it would open up more leadership opportunities within the fire service industry.
Rayna Stewart, a junior at Fern Creek, is in the early childhood education pathway. She plans to pursue a college degree in chemistry, but said the education pathway has taught her a lot about how kids develop mentally and physically. It’s also given her a new perspective on the teaching profession.
“It made me think more about what my teachers have to do in order to teach us,” Stewart said. “It’s made me think about how it would be as a teacher — like, ‘Oh would I enjoy being a math teacher?’ ”
The model has not expanded to the school’s magnet, specialized or alternative high schools. That’s largely because those schools already offer their own career-focused education, said Mark Hebert, a district spokesperson.
Related: Some colleges have an answer for students questioning the value of higher ed: Work-based learning
Across the country, in Alaska, the Anchorage School District launched the Academies of Anchorage this past fall — with much controversy. The district rolled out the model with a mandatory career exploration academy for ninth graders, after deciding in June to allow older students to opt out following parental pushback.
Then, in November, the district emailed parents announcing that it would postpone further changes for at least a year after parents, teachers and school board members raised additional concerns about budget constraints and core classes being cut or replaced in order to make room for the academy changes. In January, the district released an updated plan saying that beginning with the 2025-26 school year, each of its main high schools would offer at least two career pathways, pending budget approval, which would be open to students in all grades but not mandatory.
Jarrett Boling, a parent with two kids in the district who has been critical of the program’s implementation, said in December that district leaders never clearly explained the academy model and why it was being launched at a time when the school system was already facing teacher shortages and a budget deficit. Nor did the district answer questions about how the model would affect students’ ability to take honors or AP classes, he said.
He said parents were surveyed about what academies they wanted but weren’t given much context about the model except that it would help increase the district’s graduation rate and build a better working relationship with the business community. “Part of my frustrations have been, I would say, mostly steered toward the school district itself and its kind of lack of transparency and information out to the public,” he said.
MJ Thim, chief of communications for the Anchorage School District, wrote in an email that the district would not make officials available for an interview for this story, saying that “we are reworking a few things with the program.”
While Louisville’s model hasn’t generated much criticism, it hasn’t been an easy journey.
The model is expensive: $5.7 million in startup money, in addition to annual costs. “It’s a big cost yearly for us, however the payoff is very well worth it,” said Pollio.
“What’s happened historically is our kids … the ones that are the most successful are on a pathway. The ones who are struggling the most are not. They are just randomly picking classes to graduate and that’s not good for engagement,” Pollio said.
Pollio credits the model, for example, for helping to boost the district’s graduation and postsecondary readiness rates. Those have risen from 81 percent to 87 percent, and 50 to roughly 80 percent, respectively, between 2018 and 2024, according to district officials. At this time, the school system does not collect employment data on its graduates.
District leaders said the program remains little-known in Louisville, even among some parents, in part because it can be complicated to explain. This year the district has done more to publicize it, working with KentuckianaWorks, the regional workforce development board, to expand partnerships with local and regional businesses. Helping local employers understand that the district has 22,000 kids in career and technical education who are graduating with employable skills is “going to change this city long-term,” said Pollio.
For Fatima Avila, the Jeffersontown branch coordinator at Class Act Credit Union, the model has been transformative.
Eight years ago, when she was a junior at Southern High School, the district launched the academies model, and a branch of the district’s credit union opened at her school. She became one of its first student employees, and continued to work there part-time while earning her bachelor’s degree in social work at Northern Kentucky University.
After graduation, she worked at a sober living home, but the role wasn’t as hands-on as she wanted and she missed the camaraderie and relationships she’d developed working in various Class Act branches. In June 2024, after Jeffersontown High School opened its own credit union branch, Avila was hired to lead it and work with students who are in the business and health sciences academy at the school.
“When I graduated high school, I did not think I would be back at Class Act like five years later,” Avila said. But she said she enjoys how the job allows her to mentor students and work with the wider community.
Lacefield, the Jeffersontown student, said she started picking up extra hours at the credit union after school to make money and because she enjoys it so much. A sophomore in the financial services pathway, she said she isn’t sure yet about her plans after high school but the credit union experience has been a positive one.
“I ended up really, really loving getting to work with members, getting to work with people,” Lacefield said. “I just know that I really want to stay, whether I make money or not.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
This story about the academy model was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
