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What does the future hold? Maryland's mandated student career counseling

From left: Noah, a Paul Laurence Dunbar High School senior, his career coach Amelia Horton-Davis, and Brady Wheeler, senior program manager of the Baltimore Career Coach Initiative. Photo: provided by MOED
From left: Noah, a Paul Laurence Dunbar High School seniro, his career coach Amelia Horton-Davis, and Brady Wheeler, senior program manager of the Baltimore Career Coach Initiative,

Tens of thousands of middle- and high-schoolers in Maryland are getting ideas about what their future could be — ideas that might not have occurred to them a few years ago. The same part of the state’s K-12 education reform effort--the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future -- that requires students be “college or career-ready” by tenth grade, calls for each student to get individualized career counseling.
We hear from two advocates for workforce counseling: Democratic Sen. Cory McCray, representing Dist. 45, and a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the product of an apprenticeship. And from Kirkland Murray, president and CEO of the Anne Arundel Workforce Development Association, and president of the statewide association of workforce boards.
Then we get an idea of what the counseling entails in a conversation with Noah, a senior at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, and with Brady Wheeler, senior program manager of the Baltimore Career Coach Initiative, a program in the Mayor's Office of Employment Development.

Sheilah Kast is the host of On The Record, Monday-Friday, 9:30-10:00 am.
Melissa Gerr is a Senior Producer for On the Record. She started in public media at Twin Cities Public Television in St. Paul, Minn., where she is from, and then worked as a field producer for Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland. She made the jump to audio-lover in Baltimore as a digital media editor at Mid-Atlantic Media and Laureate Education, Inc. and as a field producer for "Out of the Blocks." Her beat is typically the off-beat with an emphasis on science, culture and things that make you say, 'Wait, what?'