Whether high school students should be paid for on-the-job training became a central point of discussion during Thursday’s budget hearing, as members of the Legislature engaged with the Virgin Islands Board of Career and Technical Education over the financial and motivational aspects of school-to-work programs.
The conversation arose when the board appeared before the Committee on Budget, Appropriations, and Finance to defend its budget request on Thursday. Senator Blyden wondered whether the Board considered it beneficial to have students train alongside contractors and “have an opportunity to work with these individuals as we build our territory.”
“It makes a tremendous difference. But the problem is, who's going to pay these students?” replied Joann Murphy, the board’s chair. “Many of these companies, they can't afford to pay our students working during the summer.”
Senator Kurt Vialet responded. “There was never no paid component to get a student to go into a school-to-work component,” he stated. “It was part of the vocational track…What they were receiving is training. Somebody in the field was training these students, and that was the trade-off,” he continued.
“We need to stop saying that we need to pay in order to have a school-to-work component,” Senator Vialet, a former school principal, argued. Instead, he emphasized the need for transportation to carry students to and from job sites. “Stop saying we need funding. We can't do this,” he told the board’s leadership.
He pushed back further against the desire to pay students. “You want students to be intrinsically motivated to take these courses…It was never that way.” “Let's try to get our students moving in the right direction without that carrot in front of them saying, ‘oh, we need money.’”
Ms. Murphy maintained that “I appreciate the past support, but we do need additional support to make this happen.” Her statement prompted Mr. Vialet to question whether the program would cease to exist if small stipends could not be paid to students. It was Ms. Murphy’s reply that “we're still trying to have it.”
“These students need to go out and get the experience. And there's nothing in the law…that says they have to have a stipend,” continued an impassioned Vialet. “We need money for equipment in the classrooms to teach them the latest methodology, etc. Let's move on to where we really need to get this.”
But for Anton Döös, the board’s executive director, the problem is much larger than simply a desire to pay students.
“In the last 15 or 20 years, there has been a fundamental change in attitude of young people towards work, towards money,” he explained. “It is not that we think that we have to pay people. I think that in today's society, young folks are looking at the dollar more than they did in the past.”
Sympathetic of VIBCTE’s challenge, Senator Hubert Frederick remarked, “when I was a young man, I wanted to make more money too, but I also wanted to learn more.”
The Virgin Islands Board of Career and Technical Education wants the Legislature to provide it with some $600,000 to establish the “Ms. Lena Schulterbrandt Fund.” If granted, VIBCTE intends to use some of that money for “paid internships for students and collaboration with the local businesses.” The board intends to “create a memorandum of agreement to ensure that CTE students in each district are guaranteed participation in their paid internship and apprenticeship programs.”
The Legislature has made no promises in that regard.
