A turnkey energy curriculum and a more measured approach to training school district leaders are coming soon to classrooms across the Permian Basin.
Ector County ISD is going to pilot the first energy course in the spring 2024. The only districts in the state that will pilot the programs are ECISD and Kermit ISD, Executive Director of Career and Technical Education Ryan Merritt said.
The Permian Strategic Partnership and its partners unveiled the initiative March 30 in a news release. Energy Pathways, a comprehensive curriculum and resource program, is designed to equip high school and post-secondary students with the knowledge and skills required for successful careers across the industry.
Permian Strategic Partnership President/CEO Tracee Bentley said it will cover all kindergarten through 12th grade schools and colleges in the 22 counties PSP serves.
“It includes a very comprehensive turnkey energy curriculum with accompanying resources. Those resources can be anything from a simulator to equipment that demonstrates the lesson in the curriculum that they’re using as well as some virtual opportunities for presentations and … demonstrations,” with top-notch instruction, Bentley said.
Merritt has said the district is participating in the Regional Energy Program of Study advisory committee, led by Education Partnership of the Permian Basin and the Education Strategy Group (ESG) through funding provided by PSP.
Bentley said they have been working with Education Strategy Group on this project for a couple of years. They specialize in career and technical education and came very highly recommended.
Bentley said the program is easy for teachers to use and should set students up for well-paying jobs.
“To our knowledge, we are the first in the state and in the region to be trying something like this. I will also say that we’re not reinventing our own curriculum; we are taking best practices and combining it all in one. Using a curriculum to this scale and accompanying resources I’m not sure has ever been done before,” Bentley said. “But the other thing that makes it unique is the curriculum is based off of … the oil and gas needs of today and the future. Their curriculum is preparing them should they want to go into the energy industry for real-life existing jobs, so the goal of this is to connect high school postsecondary training and industry, and that, to my knowledge, has not been done to that level before.”
She added that PSP was surprised that there were not more schools that offered an energy curriculum, especially one that links high school to postsecondary and industry.
“We were shocked,” Bentley said. “It really lit a fire under us to get this out there.”
She doesn’t know if it will be an elective; they didn’t want to prescribe what the schools and teachers should do.
“We really want it to be able to be individualized, so I think it depends on how the school wants to do it,” Bentley said.
Asked about internships, Bentley said they piloted a program last year for the first time.
“We gave them a little taste of what’s in oil and gas, what are all the different options … if I want to go into that field. … We took them to Chevron and to a couple of our other companies and said this is what this job looks like; this is what this looks like; and we did that for a period of five or six weeks. Then after their last week, they came back and wrote basically a report on all the things that they learned and what were their favorite parts of it,” Bentley said.
“We’re considering doing something very similar like that again, but now that we’ve got curriculum. I think students that want to be part of an internship will now be much more informed, whereas before we kind of dropped it on them all at once. I think it’s going to be very successful,” she added.
The leadership piece, in which PSP is investing $6.1 million, is geared toward current and future principals. It is a two-year training.
“What our goal with this initiative is to make sure that every school in the Permian Basin has a top-notch principal because what we know is that all the best teachers will work for the best principals and our best students usually … are under the best teachers and the best principals. It all goes hand in hand. There’s no doubt about it. Here in our region, we have, like so many other things, a lot of principal vacancies. … We’re hoping that by training a really strong bench of principals when there is an opening our superintendents will say wow I’ve got four or five really strong principal candidates, instead of oh my goodness all my candidates are brand new and I’m not sure if they’re ready to be on their own yet. That’s really the goal of this. Specifically, we’ll be training 250 upcoming principals and 100 current principals,” Bentley said.
The average experience level of principals in the region is one to five years of experience. Some districts take good teachers and make them principals. Bentley said it happens more in the smaller districts.
“This is designed to say wait a minute, let’s make sure we’ve got a solid bench of very well trained, best-of-the best training bench of principals that then can help train up and coming principals under them. So yes, this is our attempt to stop that cycle,” she added.
The training will be offered to every district in the Basin, but for Phase I, they are going for the larger districts like Ector, Midland, Greenwood ISDs and Hobbs and Carlsbad, N.M.
“The second cohort, if you will, will start to include some of the smaller school districts. But our thought process behind this was these are big population hubs. This is where the majority of the students are and those four districts are also places that are heavily recruited by the smaller districts, so if we started with the bigger districts and got principals trained there it would kind of spread throughout the region,” Bentley said.
This doesn’t replace any of the existing pipeline programs districts are already doing.
“We made sure of that before we funded it,” Bentley said.
