By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
NORTH LITTLE ROCK — Forty-three “career coaches” will be placed in Arkansas high schools in January to offer additional career guidance to students, Gov. Mike Beebe announced today.
“Our counselors are overworked in our high schools,” Beebe said at a joint meeting of the state Board of Education and the state Higher Education Coordinating Board at Pulaski Technical College in North Little Rock.
“We’ve asked our counselors to be mama and daddy and social worker, disciplinarian, sometimes health expert,” Beebe said. “We’ve asked them to do virtually everything in the world without giving them additional resources and helping them do that. We’re going to provide them some help.”
Beebe also unveiled a new online resource to help Arkansans find jobs and announced that up to $8,000 in financial aid may be available, depending on each applicant’s needs, to help pay for career training and education.
The projects are part of an expansion of Arkansas Works, the governor’s strategic initiative to coordinate education, career training and economic development. The expansion is estimated to cost $10 million to $12 million and will be paid for with federal money obtained through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
The coaches will be employed by two-year colleges in the communities where they are placed. Twenty-one counties have been chosen to receive the first coaches as part of a three-year pilot program that could be expanded to more counties later, depending on how successful the program is and how much money becomes available, Beebe said.
The first coaches will be placed in schools in Bradley, Chicot, Crittenden, Desha, Hempstead, Jackson, Jefferson, Lafayette, Lee, Mississippi, Monroe, Nevada, Newton, Ouachita, Phillips, Poinsett, St. Francis, Searcy, Sharp, Stone and Woodruff counties.
The counties were chosen for their high unemployment and/or low college-going rates.
“We’re going to start it out in some designated areas that the greatest amount of risk exists in,” Beebe said.
The coaching jobs will go to people who are “committed and passionate about what we’re trying to do,” the governor said. College degrees will be required.
Beebe also said Arkansans can now get help locating jobs through the College and Career Planning System, which can be found on Arkansas Works’ Web site.
“Once they go to that central point they can establish what they want to do in life, what are their likes and what are their dislikes, what are they strong at and what are they weak at, and match up what that career might be, match up the opportunities that exist out there for that career, match up the companies that are looking for that sort of stuff, match up what they need to learn going forward in order to be able to achieve that,” Beebe said.
Beebe said the projects he announced today should “put us in a posture that when this recession is over, as it will be, we’re in the best position to come out of it on a rising tide that turns all up.”
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On the Net:
www.arworks.arkansas.gov
