From the Desk of the Director

At ECTC (Elite Career & Technology Center), our heartfelt vision is that this program would be a community-based resource to accomplish three major things:

(1) help residents expand their career options and obtain the highest quality employment available;
(2) motivate participants to invest in themselves, explore their dreams, and their God given talent and creativity; and (3) operate as a deterrent to negative peer pressure, violence, and crime.

You don’t need a lot of statistics to know that our schools, public and private, are increasingly dangerous places for our children to try to get an education.  If you have school age children, just talk to your kids or turn on the evening news.  It’s quite obvious that violence doesn’t discriminate.  In favored metropolitan areas and the most remote rural communities, our nation has been horrified at various atrocities taking place in some of our schools.  Violent intruders, kids carrying guns, and buying and selling drugs in schools; we’d like to think it’s not happening in our child’s school, but we know it is.

We need our children to be leaders, not followers.  Our children need a sure sense of self, confidence in their skills and abilities, and opportunities to explore and build their dreams.  Those who see themselves as leaders are less likely to give in to peer pressure, more likely to invest in themselves as leaders, and are usually quite goal oriented – just the kind of people we want running the future.

At ECTC, youth can explore activities and occupations that interest them, find out how they best learn, have fun engaging in physical activity while learning about their community, access industry certifications, and receive portfolios that give insight into the students’ interests, personality, and learning styles.  

Over the years America has lost whole industries to other countries.  Yes, we expect new industries to emerge, but schools would have to change educational goals and requirements and workers would have to be retrained.  We knew temporary jobs would replace full time employment with benefits, non-managerial wages would flatten and freeze, and low and moderate income residents would be ill prepared to benefit from a world wide economy.

What are the new industries?  How can skills be transferred to different occupations?  Where can workers find out how they measure up to other workers nationally?  How can workers find the work environment that best suits them as individuals?  Where can workers obtain nationally recognized job certifications?  ECTC’s vision is to be a resource geared to the needs of both the youth and adults.                                             Jaye Johnson