LEXINGTON (CBS) – Staggering pupil mortgage debt in the U.S. Many families are taking a new look at Vocational-Technical training for their 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 how mother and father observe his faculty and 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.
He beams with satisfaction as he gives the grand tour of the fantastic construction nearing completion in the lovely Minuteman National Historical Park. “It’s nearly every emotion you can believe right here aside from disappointment – it’s comfortable, 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 $ hundred and forty-four million is a construction that formally opens on October four – the faculty’s first update because of 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. 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. 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, designed like a dealership….This is a TOIL lab – standschnology Office Innovation Lab – it’s mirrored via the labs 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 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 vast feel of engineering. However, I’ve gone via all the disciplines with exclusive training and learned the precise electric engineering,” Lee said.