Keefe Tech - Two Educations in One

Mary Greendale, www.hollistonnetnews.com

Keefe Tech – the name alone may produce a mental stereotype of the kids that go there – troublemakers or just plain troubled? Under-achievers? Tough?

How about students with “A’s”in academics? How about gold medal winners in specialty trades? How about kids that love school and do well as a result? How about diversity that offers cultural understanding?

I had the chance to interview five Holliston students who attend Keefe Tech: Fred Mathews – 11th grade– metals technology; Alexandra (Alex) Chin – grade 10 – commercial art; Jessica Nerbentski, 11th - commercial art; Dan Valovcin -11th –metals technology, Aaron Paechet – 9th – exploratory, possibly electrical.

What motivated them to leave the cocoon of Holliston and choose to do high school at Keefe instead of HHS? The number one answer from these five students was “hands-on training.”

“Holliston couldn’t do the same,” said Dan Valovcin. These kids figured out that the way they learn is different from the traditional education model.

When asked what it was like to go to school at Keefe, Fred quickly responded, “It’s fun. The people are pretty cool here, people think there’s a bunch of troublemakers…it’s not that way. It’s not anything like regular school; you get to do hands-on stuff.”

Fred is an A student today, unlike his experience in traditional classrooms. He’d known since he was eight that he wanted to follow his father and work in metal welding, and he has won state recognition for his skills in a voke school competition. He’s a star student today.

Faith Chrisom, a resident of Holliston and on staff at Keefe in Admissions and Job Placement, said that these kids came in at the best time – right out of 8th grade. That way they got to spend a full year exploring the different fields taught at Keefe.

Freshmen do two periods each day in the career exploratory program along with English, Science, Math and History. After sampling from the menu of 14 programs [1], they choose four to concentrate on until May of the freshman year. At that point they choose their major and spend the last few weeks of school getting established in that program.

As sophomores, they start the serious training, rotating one week in their specialty and one week on academics. In grade 12, they have the opportunity to join a co-op program with businesses in the area. Some of these businesses even fund college for the Keefe grads. Fred and Dan are going into the co-op program and instead of training in class, will do so on the job and get paid for doing it.

About 50% of Keefe students in the 2005 class went on to higher education. Jessica and Alex plan to, but Fred knows already that he won’t do that. Dan is leaning toward the military. “I want to see how I can get further education in welding, underwater, more in-depth learning on ships and planes,” he explained. Aaron as a freshman isn’t sure yet what he’ll do after graduation.

According to Faith, Keefe’s college prep program is definitely “not easy. The difference is that Keefe students spend half the time in training as applied learning and half in academic education. They do (the academics) in half the time. Are they ready to take SAT’s? Yes. Do they get into colleges and universities? Absolutely. It’s like getting two educations in one.”

Dan put it this way, “We still have the same classes of a normal school, we still learn the basics that any other high school would learn. There’s no compromise on the level of learning.” Besides, Dan explains, “to be on co-op you need good grades. It’s a motivation to do well.”