With full-throttle participation across all grades – that’s how Beveridge Middle School launched its second year of Careerockit involvement.
On Tuesday, Feb, 12, the school’s 8th graders split up (about 35-50 students per group) and traveled to seven different locations – Lozier, Conagra Brands, Werner Enterprise, SecretPenguin, Buildertrend, Company Kitchen and Novozymes. The student groups spent the morning touring and learning about different career offerings at each company.
Their 7th grade counterparts stayed at school and listened to career speakers from throughout the community. Beveridge lined up a total of 20 speakers; each student listened to eight different speakers throughout the morning. Then, in the afternoon, Jaymes Sime, executive director of MICAH House, spoke to the entire 7th grade class for an hour. Earlier in the day, he assembled with the 6th graders to complement a variety of career lessons they were completing in their regular classrooms.
Introducing career options to students is nothing new at Beveridge. It’s held a Career Day with a variety of speakers for many years. School counselor Anna Sully Sparwasser says getting on board with the Chamber’s Careerockit in 2018 let the school “expand our career experiences and involve different areas that we had not tapped into in past years.”
She adds, “I am an advocate for getting middle schoolers to think about their future career possibilities. Careerockit links our students to businesses in our community. These experiences open up doors to students that they didn’t even know existed.”
That’s the main goal, she says – introducing students to a variety of career opportunities that they may not have been exposed to in their lives: “Hopefully, the experiences will spark some new ideas and areas of interest for them. I like students to see that the world of work is bigger than they have ever imagined.”
