LEXINGTON (CBS) – Staggering pupil mortgage debt in the U.S. Has a whole lot of families taking a new have a look at Vocational-Technical training for his or her excessive college youngsters.
This fall, a brand new faculty for the 21st Century will open in Lexington, led with the aid of a man who has made it his mission to change the manner mother and father observe his faculty and to help younger humans find their reason.
“It took me eleven years to get this accredited. However, that’s too long, but that’s some other tale,” stated Dr. Ed Bouquillon.
Traditional Minutemen were revolutionaries ready at a moment’s note. Still, Dr. Ed Bouquillon is a progressive who has battled for over a decade to build the brand new Minuteman Regional Vocational Technical High School in Lexington.
As he gives the grand tour of the fantastic construction nearing completion in lovely Minuteman National Historical Park, he beams with satisfaction. “It’s nearly every emotion you can believe right here aside from disappointment – it’s comfortable, it’s exciting, I get emotional,” he stated.
As college students call him, Dr. Bouquillon, or “Dr. B,” is the Superintendent-Director of Minuteman High School. The staggering $a hundred and forty-four million is constructing that formally opens on October four – the faculty’s first update because the 1960s. His ardor is supporting college students to find theirs.
“We are 12 months in advance of agenda,” he points out, “and slightly below price range. We’re going to spend all the money on the children though – so it’s been an amazing revel in. What is faculty for? It’s about man or woman economic possibility and giving children a feel of wherein they’re going and why they’re going there, and that’s what Minuteman does.”
Minuteman serves ten groups West and North of Boston: Acton, Arlington, Belmont, Bolton, Concord, Dover, Lancaster, Lexington, Needham, and Stow.
Students can examine one among extra than a dozen professional majors – alternating one week of teachers with one week of career studies: Biotechnology, Cosmetology, Culinary Arts and Hospitality, Design and Visual communications, Early Education and Teaching, Electrical Wiring, Engineering, and Robotics Automation, Environmental Science, Health Occupations, Horticulture, and Plant Science, Multi-Media Engineering, Programming, and Web Development, Welding and Metal Fabrication.
This is not your grandfather’s Voc/Tech college.
“It’s modified quite,” Bouquillon says. “When humans listen to that phrase, they have terrible connotations of it. Because for such a lot of generations, it changed into relegated to one wing of the building or the basement. It’s in which “those” youngsters went. It has remarkably changed and evolved.”
To say he’s excited might be a real understatement. His tour of the construction consists of stops in the large foyer with hovering ceilings. “This is simply the pumping heart of the constructing,” he stated.
To automotive – “this is our car middle, and it’s designed like a dealership….This is a TOIL lab – stands for Technology Office Innovation Lab – it’s mirrored via the labs that they’ve at Lincoln Labs.”
With a prevent at a Broadway-degree theater: “This theater area has been designed for coaching and studying,” Bouquillon stated. “We should train the complete baby the complete person and an appreciation of the arts and the occupational possibility within the arts is so below estimated by using families and using faculty.”
Graduating seniors like Ben Keaton wish they could have skilled the new constructing, however, recognize how Minuteman prepared them – in Ben’s case for Biomedical Engineering at George Washington University: “It’s loads exceptional from a normal High School; you get an extraordinary training,” he explained.
Or Sophia Lee, who plans to observe Engineering at Carnegie-Mellon: “Coming into Minuteman, I had the overall vast feel of engineering. However, I’ve gone via all of the disciplines with exclusive training and learned the precise electric engineering,” Lee said.