@work on the economy:

 

 

 

Growing Talent and Jobs in Northeastern NC

 

 

The challenge of building a strong economy in northeastern North Carolina is one that the region has been working on for decades. There is no shortage of ideas, but finding the right ways to make good ideas work has been tough. On June 11th Elizabeth City State called the question, and brought together some great minds to get to work on solving it.

 

More than 60 leaders from 21 counties attended ECSU’s "Economic Development Summit," a multi-sector meeting of the minds convened to find ways to leverage the strengths of the university and community at large and create opportunities for sustainable economic advancement in northeastern North Carolina.

 

Following in the footsteps of the 2006 Economic development summit held at ECSU, this conference was convened by Abdul Rasheed, Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Chancellor Dr. William Gilchrist.

 

The 2006 summit was followed by a systemwide effort to determine how all of UNC’s campuses could respond to the needs of the state. The resulting report, “UNC Tomorrow,” recommended, among other things, that campuses take a hands-on approach to helping surrounding communities solve economic and social challenges,

 

One of the main topics of discussed at this summit was the role of the university in attracting the kinds of jobs and subsequent development needed to transform and sustain a region like northeastern North Carolina, which has struggled under the weight of poverty and low levels of investment.

 

Anita Brown-Graham, director of the Institute for Emerging Issues at N.C. State University, spoke to the "catch-22" faced by many rural economies. “Will successful young people choose to live in an area where the nearest movie theater is 30 miles away?” Brown-Graham asked. “The answer is they won’t.” And without an educated labor force, how can rural areas expect to attract the kind of jobs that will bring that development?

 

One sector that shows promise in the region is aviation. Vann Rogerson, president of the Edenton-based Northeast Commission, noted the potential for job growth in aviation remains strong. ECSU is the only university in the UNC system that offers an aviation degree, and its graduates and expertise help position Hyde County as a top contender for one of six Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) testing locations that the Federal government is planning to build. “The commercial side of UAVs is exploding,” Rogerson added.

 

In addition to its role in attracting investment and employment to the area, Elizabeth City State is itself a major force in the state economy; an economic impact study released in June shows that in 2010, ECSU had a payroll of $59 million and an economic impact of $112 million, most of which stayed in North Carolina.

 

@work in the community:

 

 

 

 A Team Approach to Ensure High Quality,

Low-Cost Education Everywhere

 

Many rural North Carolina public schools simply don’t have the volume of students to be able to afford teaching the highest level courses in science math and other subjects. Others have huge challenges retaining the teachers who deliver those high level courses. But the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics has developed a cutting-edge technology solution that is helping solve both problems.

 

NCSSM uses Internet Video Conferencing (IVC) to get high level courses and teachers into the state’s most rural and remote counties, like Perquimans, in northeastern North Carolina.

 

Perquimans County is largely a farming community, with little industry. The tax base is low. But the aspirations of the students are high:  one-quarter of the Perquimans County High School students are taking upper level distance education courses from NCSSM at any given time, and NCSSM teaches all  the Honors Physics or AP Environmental Science courses. According to Victor Eure, Director of Technology at Perquimans County Schools, “NCSSM has opened doors to us that we couldn’t have been able to offer.” 

 

NCSSM’s approach makes them different from many traditional distance education courses. NCSSM provides the lead instructor, but is joined by the home school’s in-house faculty member, who  acts as a videoconference facilitator, a monitor, a trouble-shooter for technical issues, as well as a resource to help keep students focused and their progress on track.

 

It’s a win-win solution that couldn’t work without NCSSM. Eure notes:  “There is no doubt that our students who have participated in the NCSSM distance learning courses have been better prepared to be successful in post-secondary college environments.”

 

The North Carolina School of Science and Math connects to more than 30 school statewide educating 500 students through IVC classrooms and another 200 students via online courses.  In each case, these class offerings provide advanced instruction that is largely unavailable in the local area. 

 

For more information about NCCM’s IVC, distance education and extended programs, please visit http://www.dlt.ncssm.edu/ 

 

  

@work in the world:

 

 

 

 Getting To Global at NC’s K-12 Schools and Community Colleges

 

How in the world do North Carolina’s K-12 schools and community colleges get students equipped with everything they need to compete in a global economy? For starters, teachers and administrators have to know the latest themselves. Then they need easy-to-use lessons and tools they can use in the classroom. And it wouldn’t hurt to have a network they could draw on to compare notes as they try to integrate global principles into their curriculum.

 

That’s just what 47 leaders from 15 K-12 districts and 10 community colleges got at this year’s Global Education Leaders program, sponsored by World View, a program of UNC-Chapel Hill.

 

This was the 13^th year World View has brought together administrators for an intensive week-long summer study of global issues that impact students and communities.

 

Over the course of a week educators heard from a total of 36 expert speakers on a variety of global issues or regions of the world, with emphasis on both educating participants and helping them determine how to translate what they learned into their classrooms. Speakers put particular emphasis during the seminar on geopolitical, cultural, health, environmental, global conflict and economic issues in this year’s program.

 

The goal, according to World View director Dr. Robert Phay, is to make sure that top leaders of each participating organization graduate “equipped with tools to implement new global initiatives,” then return home with a commitment to “expanding the worldview of their colleagues and students.”

 

Determining a way to help educators translate global issues from the news and into the classroom is a challenge given the already-existing curricular demands schools are facing. Through its programming,  World View attempts to make that easier by connecting educators to experts from its staff and the state’s various National Resource Centers.

 

Over the past fourteen years, World View has worked with almost 20,000 educators in 99 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, offering year-round professional development and outreach programs, including face-to-face seminars, and learning modules for the traditional classroom and online. 

 

Fact of the Month

 

 Did you know? NC DOCKS (http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/) allows you to know and read all sorts of ideas and articles by UNC scholars. Through the portal, six UNC campuses (ASU, ECU, UNCG, UNCP, UNCW and WCU) post full text articles, audio recordings, dissertations and other things to the web for open review by anyone who is interested. Last year full-text documents were viewed 787,147 times. This year the database is on track to hit more than 1,000,000 views. Other scholarly repositories of full text materials in the state include the NCSU Scholarly Publications Repository (http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/repository/) and the Carolina Digital Repository (https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/) at UNC Chapel Hill.  

 

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