A lot can change in a year, especially if you’re talking about Cisco high school training centers. The program, designed to prepare students for successful careers in the Information Technology industry, began in Rhode Island last year at the East Providence Career & Technical Center, the Woonsocket Career & Technical Center and Exeter-West Greenwich High School. Since then its presence in the state has more than doubled.
”We went from three in September of 1999 to eight in September of 2000,” said George Loftus, a consultant with the firm Loftus and Meier, who works closely with the program.
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Loftus, who is also acting chairman of the Rhode Island Information Technology Academy, said the group is looking at schools for next year to further increase its presence in Rhode Island, but has not decided how many they would like to select.
”Typically our model is to put a request for proposal out on the street in November, then the business partners will look at the schools,” he said.
The businesses behind the schools that began last year are American Power Conversion, Atrion Networking Corporation, and Synet, Inc. The locations which began teaching the program this fall are Cranston Career & Technical Center, which is partnered with Network Six; Davies Career & Technical Center in Lincoln, which has Fidelity Investments as its partner; Providence’s Hanley Career & Technical Center, which is partnered with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island; North Kingstown High School, partnered with CompUSA, and Shea High School in Pawtucket, which partnered with DefendNet.
The business partners provide technical assistance, guest speakers, tours and possible student internships.
Stephanie Sullivan, business partnership coordinator at Davies Technical High School, called the Cisco Systems Initiative a ‘win-win partnership between businesses, schools, colleges and government.’
Sullivan said Kenneth Rathgeber, the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Fidelity is on the board of trustees, at Davies, so the partnership was an easy fit.
“He got us hooked up with the best technology for the school,” she said. “He gave us his head tech guy to set up the computers for the Cisco program.”
Peter Woodberry is the dean of business and technology at the Community College of Rhode Island, which runs a regional training center for the teachers, and is also a licensed Cisco training facility. He is pleased with the program’s success.
“I think it’s going according to plan,” he said, “We had early indications from some of the businesses in Rhode Island that there was a huge demand for people with a networking background.”
The reason Woodberry cannot say for sure how the program is going is because the first batch of high school students enrolled in the program only began last year, and the program runs for four semesters. Some of the seniors who participated last year are now completing the program at CCRI. About 200 CCRI students have completed the course, but this is a group with a median age of 34.
The main goal of having the program in the high schools is to get kids interested in the IT industry, said Rick Kovar, executive director of Rhode Island Technology Council and Cisco agent for the RIITA.
“The problem RITEC recognizes is that kids have a very poor image of the IT world,” he said, “doing what I call salt mining.”
Kovar said a student passing the test upon the course’s completion is looking at a starting salary between $35,000 and $40,000.
“One kid went on the Internet to a Monster Board,” he said, “and before he could shut his computer down, the phone was ringing.”
