BVSD juniors and seniors gain career experience in first-ever Grad Plus Leadership Academy

En Español

The Boulder Valley School District’s Grad Plus framework is designed to serve students from preschool through 12th grade, focusing on giving students access to opportunities so that they can graduate from high school with more than just a diploma. 

The four quadrants of the Grad Plus framework are: 

• College Credit Before Graduation
• Seal of Biliteracy
• Work-Based Learning
• Industry Certifications

This summer, during the BVSD Grad Plus Leadership Academy, BVSD hosted 12 rising juniors and seniors to complete two of the quadrants, while learning about their field of career interest. 

The Leadership Academy was created by Dr. Bianca Gallegos, BVSD Executive Director of Strategic Partnerships, and Dr. Staurt Lord, CEO and President of Delta Developmental, LLC. 

“In the early spring of this year, Dr. Stuart Lord approached me about a Summer Leadership Academy that he wanted to help co-host and launch at BVSD where he wanted to be able to prepare students for an internship, which is part of work-based learning in Grad Plus,” said Gallegos. “Another piece that we added to the academy is college credits before graduation, which is why they all are completing the CLEP test as well.”

The College Level Examination Program (CLEP) is a standardized test created and administered by the College Board. The College Board offers CLEP tests to everyone, assessing the test taker’s knowledge on 36 college-level subjects, and allowing them to earn college credit without taking college-level courses.

The BVSD Grad Plus Leadership Academy's main goal was to give high school students across Boulder Valley the opportunity to build leadership skills and get a head start on their careers.

To complete the goal of the Leadership Academy, Dr. Gallegos and Dr. Lord engaged students in leadership and work-based learning activities through mentorship and partnerships with industry professionals. 

The BVSD Grad Plus Leadership Academy had over 100 applicants of rising juniors and seniors across the Boulder Valley District; out of those 100, 12 were selected to begin their preparation for their internships. 

“We wanted to make sure that the students that we picked were students from across our different high schools that were also racially diverse groups of students,” said Gallegos. “The students needed to show a lot of interest and promise in being committed to the internship because this is a big commitment, you're doing a lot of work and learning during the summer.”

Selected students spent one week preparing for real-world work experience and leadership in their internships and school, work, and life following high school. 

Rising junior at Monarch High School, Chelsea Dietz who interned with the Boulder Jewish Community Center preschool said, “I got to learn a lot about communication and taking advantage of opportunities because a big thing we focused on was talking with the people around you, and then taking the opportunity to do something.” 

Andy Gu, a rising junior at Peak to Peak Charter School interning with the BVSD Information Technology department shared, “my favorite lessons through the academy were interview skills and effective communication.”

“Being smart as it is, is important, but being able to convey your ideas is even more important because even if you have those ideas, you can't convey them properly,” Gu shared. “Interview skills are not something that you can learn easily in school, so I'm able to learn those skills that I need in the future.”

Following the first week of preparation in the Leadership Academy, students were in an internship for the next four weeks based on their career interests.

“The internship placements we did through our professional networks. So Dr. Stuart Lord and I reached out to our colleagues and we also had a database through Jody Bennett, she's the BVSD Work Based Learning Coordinator who helped connect us to internship placements,” said Gallegos. 

The internship placements were based on the interests of the students.

One internship host was Rob Price, BVSD Assistant Superintendent of Operational Services. The department includes a lot of key areas from transportation to serving students food to sustainability to keeping our schools safe and well-cared for. He  jumped at the opportunity for an intern.

“I had a lot of excitement just because I feel like we need to be involving students more in our work,” said Price. “And I will say there have been a lot of times where we fail to ask, we come up with ideas we think are best but we fail to ask students what is best and I think this is an opportunity for Clive to come in and see how we're doing things and make some recommendations on how we can improve in the future to serve students better.”

Price was matched with Clive Klinkenberg, a rising senior at Peak to Peak Charter School. Klinkenberg wants to pursue a career in Firefighting to become a firefighter paramedic and eventually a fire chief.

“When we sat down we talked about his career interests. I thought we aligned pretty well in operations at least, wanting to be a firefighter, so we had him shadow each department, specifically our safety and security department, just to see how those two were in alignment,” said Price. “I was hoping that by the end of this, he's going to work with every single one of those departments, maybe only for two or three days each, but just to get a better understanding of what we do every single day.”

Another internship placement was for Gu. Although he has only begun looking into what he wants to do beyond college, has found an interest in engineering and computer science and so he was placed with the BVSD Information Technology department and it has greatly changed his perspective. 

“I'm working with the BVSD IT team, but I think it's a different kind of opportunity. It's one of those opportunities that at the age of 16, I'm not going to be able to work with these people but going through an internship I'm getting that experience,” said Gu. “From our perspective, from the students and the outside public, BVSD IT, or IT in general, doesn't look like that big of an organization and that it is not that hard, not that important, but behind the scenes, it is, there's a whole lot more to it.”

The program finished for most interns on Thursday, July 18th with a celebration of their hard work on August 8th where interns will be recognized for completing the Leadership Academy and receive a $500 stipend, thanks to BVSD’s foundation Impact on Education. 

Although the program only just finished, plans for the Leadership Academy to continue into next year are already underway. Impact on Education has written a grant with the hope of increasing the program to double the amount of students to 24 next year. 

“We're excited to be able to make the program even better next year,” said Gallegos. 

The BVSD Grad Plus Leadership Academy not only gave students a chance to learn about preferred fields, but also about their lives beyond this internship and beyond graduation. 

Parker Furst, a BVSD rising senior who interned with Dr. Ghita Carroll in the BVSD Sustainability and Energy Department shared, “This experience has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I will not soon forget. I learned about what it truly means to be a leader through our daily lessons, but mainly through our leaders. They showed us what it truly means to lead through the way we interact with others, get our ideas in motion, and command a room. A statement that will continue with me into my future is one they taught me, ‘be seen, be heard, and be remembered.”