Marc Finer (00:00)
We want our students to be able to see themselves in this industry and say, There's a place for me in this industry. I can see myself doing that.
Dee Davis (00:16)
Good morning and welcome to the Management Under Construction podcast. I'm your host, Dee Davis, and I can't even tell you how excited I am to have two guests with us today. Today we have Mark and Beth from Epic Campus in Colorado, best high school campus I have ever seen. It is so exciting what they're doing there. They are working with building trades and lots of other disciplines to help introduce youngsters to the industry.
So before we get going too much more, I'm gonna let you each introduce yourself. Beth, would you mind giving us a start?
Beth Best (00:50)
Sure. Thanks, Dee. I'm so excited to be here with you today. My background is is different from Mark's. I come from industry. 30 plus years in business. I also ran a nonprofit. And then today at Epicampus, I'm the industry partnership coordinator. And what that means is I'm the bridge between education and industry. And I'm out in the community meeting with industry and getting them involved and interested in Epicampus. And it's a great career. I love it.
Dee Davis (01:19)
That's awesome.
Marc Finer (01:20)
All right. Thanks for having us here, Dee Always excited to talk about Epic Campus. My journey in construction began back when I was in high school. I used to work summers along with my dad, who's a general contractor. did that all through college as I was preparing to become an industrial arts educator, got into that, continued construction for the next thirty years, had my own residential remodeling business for over twenty years. And when we started putting Epic together, my goodness, this is this is just the
the pinnacle of my my existence, taking my construction background, my education background and and just being able to bring out this next generation.
Dee Davis (01:58)
It's so awesome. And that's one of the things that I was so excited about when I got to visit your campus last year It was the perfect merger of industry and education, which are the two things that I'm extremely passionate about. Could one of you take the lead on describing to us really what is Epic Campus and who is it designed to serve?
Beth Best (02:19)
Sure, I'll take that question. So Epic Campus is a career and technical education campus serving students within Littleton Public Schools. We also serve students in Inglewood and Sheridan Public Schools, which is really wonderful to bring the full community together at Epic. Students remain connected with their home high schools, but they come to Epic to explore career pathways through very hands-on.
and career connected learning. We have pathways that range from aerospace and advanced manufacturing to construction and architecture. We have future educator, health sciences, natural resources. But really what the crux with Epic Campus is having students not choose between whether they're going to go to school or go into the workforce. It's really giving them an opportunity to explore.
Because our name is an acronym. It stands for Explorative Pathways for Innovative Careers. So we want students to come and explore. test drive a career, test drive an interest in a career, so that when they graduate from high school, they're prepared in what they want to do. We engage with industry. We cannot do this work without industry. They've helped us design our curriculum. They're involved every day. And I'm sure we'll get more into that later in the podcast.
But it's just an opportunity for students to earn industry certifications and content credit towards graduation and also concurrent enrollment with higher ed. It's just a wonderful campus. We'd love to have anybody come see it if they're interested.
Dee Davis (03:54)
And I love the idea that kids can explore all these different career opportunities and there's no commitment. You know, you're not enrolling in a degree program to graduate for the degree that maybe you don't love so much. You're just checking stuff out. You take a class or two, and if it's not your jam, then you can go do something else, right? I love that about it. We're gonna talk about the dedicated epic pathways and everything.
And work site tours and internships that you guys have. You grade workforce readiness, which I found very interesting in the conversations that I had with you guys earlier this year, when we were on campus. I got to meet these folks when we were on campus. They hosted for us at NAWIC the annual Block Kids event that we do every year. And we hosted on an epic campus this year. And that was when I got to meet these two fine people and learn all about their program.
And though we were so busy with block kids the whole time we were there, I got to explore a little bit in their facility. And I thought that all you guys did was construction when we first got there. I had no idea there's real estate, there's all these other things that you do. And I'm like, man, would I have loved to have a program like that when I was a kid in high school? There was nothing like that where I went to school. Mark, I understand that you were involved when the district narrowed down which kind of pathways that they wanted to offer.
I think there were seven that were launched. Can you walk us through that decision process and how was that shaped?
Marc Finer (05:23)
Yeah, so when the district was looking at what pathways we were going to offer, there was definitely input from the school board, from the community, educators. One of the big things that we looked at was we wanted to give students opportunities where they could succeed once they graduated. So we didn't want to offer them something where there's no workforce demand. So that that was a big part of it is working with workforce readiness programs.
throughout the county and the state and and seeing really what was out there where these students could then take these skills, these certifications they're earning, and either go right into the industry or go on to some further training, any kind of post secondary, but come out of it with a career. So we wanted to make sure that we're offering them something that was realistic.
Dee Davis (06:09)
Well, that's a great point because as we all know, you can go get all kinds of education and certifications and degrees in things, but if you can't go get a real job out of it, then it's not very helpful. We we have plenty of conversations about that around college degrees all the time. So you guys looked at livable wages and regional job demand. Can you describe how you did that research and how you balance the local needs and the statewide opportunities?
Beth Best (06:37)
We had a a person at our district office that spent a couple of years deep diving into the local economy in our the county that we're in and also statewide and looked at where there were gaps in employees, where there was looking at at trends for massive retirements in the future. And then they were doing a deep dive into which one what careers are those
How would they connect back to a pathway? And what type of credentialing? Do you need a degree to go with that? Can you do a two-year degree? Can you go to a trade school? do you need any type of higher or post secondary training after high school? And then they looked at the livable wages and they looked at the demand. And it was quite an arduous process that they went through to bring that information back to our school board. And so when the pathways were presented,
those details were taken into consideration and really drove the decision ultimately on what pathways we were providing because we wanted to be able to have these students leave high school prepared for a career, knowing what that path might be to get to that career and knowing that they would be able to have a living wage, to be able to to live here in Colorado and also contribute to the economy themselves.
Dee Davis (07:58)
Sounds like none of this was arrived at lightly. There was a lot of research and background that went into that. That is so smart. How did you avoid duplicating other local programs?
Marc Finer (08:09)
So when we were looking at the pathways putting in, looking what other CTE facilities and other districts in the Denver metro area were offering, some of them were duplicates, some of them are very different. Part of it had to do with you know, our community, right? What what are the needs within our community, what are the businesses within our community, what are the constraints of our campus size and the buildings, things like that.
I'll give you an example. When we looked at construction trades, there are other campuses that are doing construction trades to doing the build side. And we got the opportunity, while we were planning this, we had each pathway or seven pathways, each has a lead, kind of like a department chair. And we got to visit some of these other facilities, which was very helpful. And so I started kind of modeling my program and the construction trades off these others. And in my head, I was thinking, okay.
That three to five year range, we're gonna expand the program. We're gonna go from just the trade side, we're gonna bring in the design side, some architecture, some landscape design, interior design. But as I met with industry, and this was the best part about having this year to plan the program, is I got to meet with a lot of industry. And when I would meet with industry and I'd tell them this five year plan, one of the questions I always got back was, Well, why are you waiting?
three to five years to bring the design side in. And when I realized I didn't have a good answer, I kind of went, why not be innovative? Why not do things that other schools aren't doing? And we had the opportunity to do that. So I think from looking at other schools and speaking with other instructors and admins at CTE facilities, we we really were able to build epic campus around what our community
needs are and wants are CTE facilities, the instructors, admin in the state have always been very open and sharing with other schools. And now that we've been established for a few years, we have other schools in state and out of state, high schools and colleges coming to see our program. And I think it's just a phenomenal network where everyone is very open to helping each other out. because we all do this for the students and we know
We don't have a future if we're not putting out the future. So I think we we have some things that duplicate and and we have some things that are very unique. Our natural resource pathway, hydroponic growing and vertical growing, is very unique. We do reciprocate with some neighboring districts. So we didn't want to redo cosmetology and automotive because we have two districts that border us where we can send our students for that program. And for programs they don't have, they can send their students to us.
So that's really nice because it benefits everybody and we're not redoing something, especially automotive that takes up a lot of space, a lot of resource. So that's that's a great thing. And again, how does that happen? It's because their communication is there.
Dee Davis (11:04)
Well, I love the sharing. I one of the things that happens in a lot of school districts, I think, is this territorial thing where, well, that's you're in the other district, so you can't participate in that program. So that's not happening there, which is awesome. Is there any pathways that you really want to include or that are coming that aren't currently in existence? Or are we pretty set now?
Beth Best (11:25)
Dee, that is a great question. And I don't know if Mark and I have the answer to that question. There is a process in public education that we have to go through to get coursework approved. So when we look at the pathways and adding pathways, yes, there's a long list of pathways that we would love to add to Epic Campus. But at this point, we're really we're only starting our fourth year. And so we're pretty young campus already.
And so we do have industry that comes in and says, would you please add a pathway that connects to us? We do have students that come to us and say, I wish you provided XYZ. And what we're doing is we're gathering that information because in order for us to expand or add pathways, we're going to need more space.
Right now we're at our space capacity. And as you can imagine, adding space costs money. And school districts don't have just a pot of gold that they can just dip into and build a new building or expand an existing building. So it's kind of a hard question to answer. In short, yes, there are pathways that we would definitely want to add. Are we there yet? No. And so hopefully we can check back in a couple of years and then we'll have.
more information and would be able to maybe share what the plans are going forward. But right now we're just focused on starting year four.
Dee Davis (12:54)
Well, you've achieved a ton in the last four years. It's been quite amazing based on what I've seen. Mark, did you have something to add?
Marc Finer (13:03)
I do, I do. I I think one of the things, the exciting thing is even within our pathways, we've been able to grow within our first three years in our health science pathway. we heard from students that behavioral health is really big i in this generation coming up. And so we heard that and our health science department looked into it and I think it was our second year we were able to add in a behavioral health area within our health science pathway. and it really helps because
We brought in someone from the industry. That's a big part of Epic Campus. Our instructors are a mix of people that have come from the education world and people have come from the industry world and some that have come from both. So we've been able to expand our pathways like that. Construction trades a similar thing happened. The year we were planning our facility back in 2022, we had a community member attend a high school class reunion at Heritage High School.
Whitney Holtz, who's the president and CEO of Windish RV, was attending, and the principal at the school was talking about this new epic campus that was going to be opening in a year. She mentioned the seven different pathways. And I think that night, Whitney sent an email to our principal, Travis, and said, Let's meet and let's talk. And I remember Travis coming to me the next day and we're going, But what? We don't get it. So
Being very open-minded people, we had a meeting with Whitney, and within an hour we were like, we get it. Travel trailer has plumbing, electrical, HVAC, carpentry. It is a house on wheels. Not only is it a house on wheels, it's a house on wheels that always needs work. And so we did a deep dive, like Beth was saying, we looked at what are the opportunities for students coming out with this kind of a certification? What are the certifications? And we realized that.
There isn't one R V dealership on the I seventy or I twenty five corridor here in Colorado that isn't starving for technicians. And so we did some more work on that. And I ended up going out to Indiana and getting trained to be a R V technician through the R V Technical Institute. And then I became a trainer for the R VTI. And last year, and this three years of work that went into this, we launched the first high school program in the country.
To certify students as level one RV technicians. So it's a phenomenal success. We had 10 students in the class last year. Two of them are now working in the industry. Beth worked hard to get internships for those students set up through our work-based learning. And then they were hired on by the companies. So Windish RV and Airstream of Colorado took interns. Windish hired two of them on.
Next year the the class is close to doubling in size. And so it's picking up steam. And so yeah, even you know, and again, Beth said, space is a premium. Where do we do our R V class? Outside in an R V that Grand Design and Windish R V have donated to our program. So we're we're making it work and it's it's just so cool to be able to have this opportunity to to expand upon things that are that are just great for these students.
Dee Davis (16:17)
I love everything about that story, including the fact that those kids were able to go to the class and go directly to work after graduation. That's amazing. And as an RV owner, I can tell you that everything this man just said is true. Those things always need work. It never ends. I'm fortunate to be married to someone that's very handy that can handle most of that stuff for me. But until I met you, Mark, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a certified RV.
technician. But I can attest when you go, if you have to take your RV in to be serviced by somebody professional, because it's something that you just can't do, it takes forever to get it back because there's just not enough people working on that. So that is so awesome. I absolutely love that. You've mentioned several times that we have heavy involvement from industry.
partners on a day-to-day teaching. And you mentioned to me in our conversation that you bring in apprentices close to the age of the students. How do you recruit those partners and how do you set expectations for their roles in the classroom?
Beth Best (17:24)
I think it's a two part answer where I'm gonna answer a part of it and then I think Mark is gonna answer a part of it. So my job is to go out into the community and meet with businesses. And I go to chamber of commerce meetings, I go to industry sector meetings and bring them in. We start with the conversation.
what does your business do? what industry are you in? What are your workforce needs? What trends are you seeing your industry going toward? And then I get to share what Epic Campus is doing and how we're preparing the future workforce to go into that industry or an adjacent industry. And I get to have these really rich conversations with industry about what they're looking for in their future employees and what they wish these
future employees would have, what technical skills, but also what durable skills are they looking for. And we brainstorm together on how that company would like to engage with Epic Campus. If that company wants to engage in the classroom, then what I do is I connect them with that instructor or that pathway. And then the instructors in that pathway get to decide, hey,
This is where our need is. This is how we could really use you in the classroom to make a difference. And so I'm going to turn the rest of the answer over to Mark because he is masterful in working with industry and getting them involved. And he's doing some really unique, wonderful things to help industry help develop our future workforce as well as inspiring young professionals to go into the industry. So I'm going to let Mark answer the second half.
Marc Finer (19:08)
yeah, Dee bringing in industry is really big. Like Beth said, they they helped us design our curriculum around what do they need. And I think that's one of the unique questions I would always lead off. That first year when we had a a year off the floor to plan this, and I was just cold call industry. And I think, they would have that perception coming in, a lot of them, that I'm going in to talk to public education, they're looking for money.
And we would sit down and my first question to them was, What can I do for you? They'll look at you and they go, What do you mean, what can you do for me? Well, what can Epic Campus, what can we do for you to help your industry? They go, Huh, well, we need workforce. Okay. That's what we can do for you. Now, what can you do for us? How do we work together? Because a partnership is a two way street, right? And so it's not just us looking for
them to give us this, give us that. Th there's so much to it. But in the end, what are we doing? We're preparing these students to fill this huge void in the construction industry that we're all seeing right now. and so involvement takes on a a lot of different things. I think sometimes I feel like I could be the best car salesman in the world because I'll talk to one construction company and by the end of the conversation like, all right, we're in, but
You got to talk to these three other companies because I know they want to be involved. That was easy. And then there are other companies where I have to talk to five different people over eight months to just find that one person that understands what we're doing. And they go, Yes, let me put you in touch with the right people. You know, so it it's not the easiest. It's not the hardest. And I think it's because it's the construction industry. We all know that.
There is a need and and where's the gap in workforce going to come from? From the c current generation. Because we missed out on the last couple of generations. So we're there's this big gap. And I hear that from students that are out in the workforce now. They're like, Yeah, I'm the youngest one there, and then the next youngest person is like forty five years old. You know, and there's this this big old gap. So I I think we're fortunate in the construction trades pathway that our industry is really, really there to help us out.
Our other pathways also have a lot of great partnerships. it's not unusual for people to wander through our classes, industry to come through our classes on a daily basis at Epic. And our students know. It's just it's the way it is.
When we have industry come in and we we love industry to come into the classroom, we always ask them, don't just bring in your HR department, right? I mean, students can only hear about a 401k and benefits. And in a 17-year-old's head right now, what are they thinking? I want to get a new truck. When can I move out of mom and dad's house? Right. And so
They're not really thinking about that retirement piece at the moment. So we do ask them, along with your HR, along with your foreman superintendents, bring in an apprentice. Bring someone in who's closer to age to these students, who they can relate to. Bring in young women in the industry. Bring in our Latinos. We want our students to be able to see themselves in this industry and say, there's a place for me in this industry. I can see myself doing that. And
It honestly only took one year to actually bring back our alumni as apprentices. And that is one of the coolest things. Going, wow. This didn't take eight years to do, right? Like within the first year, Adalia, who had graduated from our program, she was there the first year. She was a senior. And one of our industry partners, a perfect plumber, they were in helping us out with some water tanks that were being installed that are going to be taught to our students. And
They observed watching Adelia work with her team on the bathroom mock up that they were doing. And they just watched her her professionalism, her dedication, those workforce readiness skills. And at the end of the day, I remember one of the the foremen from Perfect Plumber came up and said, Who's that girl working on the bathroom mock up over there? And my first thought was, no, what didn't go right? And I said, No, she was phenomenal.
At one point there was another team that was having a problem. She went over, she helped them problem solve it. She got right back to her team. Everyone stayed on task. They're like, that's the kind of person we want to hire. So these workforce readiness skills that we're going to get more into in this podcast, that's going to take a student in any pathway further than anything. They're going to get a four year internship or apprenticeship in the skilled trades. But if they come out of here ready to work,
That's that's gold. That's the biggest tool in their tool belt they could ever have. So having industry come in does so much. A, it gives them first writer refusal to hire people, to get them onto internships with Beth's team. It gives the students that sense of being of I can do this. And honestly, I come from a residential construction background. It's real important for me to get commercial and industrial partners in there so they can explain and they can share.
their side of the trade as well, because there's a big difference as we all know. So very important.
Dee Davis (24:33)
That's so cool. I love that story about Adalia, being able to turn around right back the next year and say, Look, not only can you do this, but I actually did it. I love those kind of stories. And it that's so much more powerful than somebody my age coming in and saying, I've got, all these years of experience. that's great. But, what what about now? Things are different now. Yes, they are different now in a good way.
I'm on a project right now with over 7,000 people on site every single day. And I see more women every single day than I've ever seen on a construction site in my whole career, all put together, I'm sure. it is incredible the difference in the last ten to fifteen years that I've seen. And there's people from everywhere in the world on this site speaking all kinds of languages. I couldn't even count how many languages I hear spoken on a daily basis.
And you see people of every color and creed, it's incredible. And when you get to see it all in one place like that, you're like, wow, this industry has really moved along in the last, 10 years or so. And that is such an awesome thing to see. And programs like this are bringing the industry forward. And that's exactly what we need. What are the biggest challenges that you face in coordinating industry partners schedules? And how do you solve?
Beth Best (25:54)
That the age-old question. And the answer is time. It's just comes down to time. Industry partners are running their businesses. They are focused on completing their own work and projects and expanding. So really it comes down to who has the time to come in. And what we want to do is we talk to them about different levels of engagement.
What does that time look like? It can be as simple as coming in and speaking to a class about their career and about their job that they're currently doing right now. And that might last 20 minutes. It could be saying that we want to provide a work site tour. And so that would be putting together time for several people within the organization to be readily available during that schedule time that we might bring students out to a work.
place to see what work looks like. So as we know that these high school students, most of them are juniors and seniors. They're 17 or 18 years old. They don't know what work looks like. And we want them to understand what work looks like, what technologies are being used.
How offices work, 'cause there's all different types of offices, right? How collaboration works within the workplace. They're they're observing all of these things. So we need to set aside a certain amount of time for us to be able to do that and do it effectively with the right people in the room to talk about the different levels of what that work is. Our classes are three hours long.
So they're a double block for our regular high school classes back at the home high school. So students choose to come to Epic campus for part of their school day. And that school day at Epic is three hours. And within that three hours, we can get a lot done. We see them two two days a week and then the next week it rotates to three days a week and so on and so forth. So within six hours a week or nine hours a week, we're very efficient on how we spend that time.
And we're very clear with industry. These are our needs, but what would you also like to share with our students? So there's all different levels of engagement. There's, there's ways, simple, like I said, to come into the classroom and share your career journey and what you're currently working on to spending an an entire three days with us. We also host industry projects where a company can come in and bring an actual product.
That they're trying to develop or a problem they're trying to solve. And they can say, we need your students' brain power. We need your students' innovation. We need your students thinking about this project and helping us solve that project. So that time commitment might be two or three weeks. It might be an entire semester. We try to meet the industry partner where they're at and what they can provide in terms of time.
And it sounds like a lot, honestly, but it really isn't. Because once they come see Epic and they engage with our students and they engage with our instructors, they realize A, I'm I really enjoy this. B, this is really impactful work. And I want to be involved. That is really how we go about scheduling with industry partners.
Dee Davis (29:18)
Well, it sounds like it's awesome and I've got to figure out how I can get more involved with Epic Campus because I am so excited about what you guys are doing over there. I can't even stand it. I know that you briefly mentioned it, but I had a at length conversation with you guys about this, so I do want to delve into it a little bit more. Your work site tours, they're not field trips.
They're different from field trips and you very specifically mentioned to me your no boots, no work policy. So can you guys please elaborate a little bit on that?
Marc Finer (29:48)
Yeah, I'd love to Dee. First of all, when students come to Epic, they they walk in, they hold their head high, they hold their shoulders back, they take a lot of pride. It's a different feel than when they're at their home high schools. When they come to Epic, they don't wear their T shirt or their hoodie of their home high school, they wear Epic gear. If you're watching a video of this, you can see Beth's repping right there with her epic gear on. Yeah.
But students in the construction pathway, they come on a campus, they've got their safety toed boots, they've got their work pants, they have an epic shirt and they have their high viz safety vests. And so they they take that pride. Our nursing students, they're walking around campus in their scrubs. We make it very industry based. I run my classroom like it's a job site, not like it's a classroom. I think the very first year we were open
Beth worked really hard in getting us to be able to go to the site up in Rhino One River North. It was a new building being constructed. It was extremely innovative. It's got a hiking canyon basically that wraps around the outside of the building with water features and hiking trail. I mean, it's unlike anything I've ever seen. And Beth worked really hard to get us in there. the GC on that was Saunders, and I
I think they were like, we're gonna see how this kind of goes. because in two days we were planning to bring a hundred high school students. So we had about ninety-six construction one students. That was our first year open. We were it was our third month of running this program and it was downtown Denver, so we had to take a bus because parking was at a minimum. And and we get there and I remember stepping off the bus and the
Area superintendent was there, the project superintendent was there, a couple foremen were all standing there. And one by one, 24 11th and 12th graders got off this bus, full-on type two safety helmets, safety glasses, high vis vest, work pants, safety toed boots, stepped off that bus, put a hand out, looked each of those superintendents in the eye, shook their hand.
And I think by the time the twenty-fourth student got off that bus, these superintendents were like, holy crap, this is something that we did not expect. And I I don't know, Beth was there with me. I was there. I we couldn't have been more proud of these students just setting that bar right there that, you know, we said, Hey, this is our chance to shine. This is either going to get us more site visits or it's going to get us kicked off forever. And these students just stepped up and it was phenomenal.
And so trade partners like Saunders and FCI have opened up just amazing site visits to us on active job sites. And in the design side, we've got Cunningham and some other architects that have invited our students to their firms downtown to see what goes on in a in an architecture firm, an engineering firm. So it's phenomenal. And again, the reason we call them site visits, not field trips, I think field trip has that connotation of,
it's a day out of school, We get to, go down to the the zoo like we did in third grade or this or that. And we're taking these students in places they don't necessarily have access to. You can't get onto a 15 story active job site as a community member, right? It just doesn't happen. And so realizing that a work site visit is class time, not a day off from class.
What these students get from that, what they learn, is amazing. Our GCs typically notify all the subs that are on that job site. And these trade partners are taking time out of their work when we go through to talk to us about their trade, what it is specifically on that job site that they are doing. It's real powerful. And again, they know that they want to get some of the minority employees to talk to the students.
the females on site to talk to the students. And it's powerful. It is so great to see them, whether they're, an apprentice, a journey worker, a master, whether they're site superintendent, a foreman, just to see those students to relate and say, hey, that person looks like me. I can relate. I can get to that level if I want. And one of the things, and you know this Dee, the construction industry is one of those industries where
You can go as far as you want. You don't necessarily have to have a bachelor's degree, a master's degree. You can work your way up. You can become VP. You can become a business owner, working your way up through the trades. And and a lot of our students, that's their their path. We have some that are going to a four year school for construction management. They know that. And they get to see, where they can go. So I think that's
my real long winded answer about field trips versus site visits, but but they're very powerful. They're
Beth Best (35:02)
I
would love to make a point. Mark said that he runs his classroom like a job site. So he tells students, our campus, they have to park off site. And so he says class starts at eight forty. That means you're in the classroom at eight forty. You're not parking your car. You're not walking in.
When you walk into class, you have your high vis vest on, you've got your long pants on, you've got your work boots on, you're ready to go at eight forty. And these kids think, yeah, I'm gonna come in with my Starbucks or whatever the first day. The second day, they know that that's not how it's gonna work, right? When we went down to One River North, we did four sessions. So we took four groups of twenty-four kids down there and we had to park the bus.
The kids saw that there was no parking at this job site. So connecting, I have to park off campus to walk to my class to be there on time. They were they were seeing if I worked here, I would have to park a half a mile away and walk up here. They saw that there was a line to use the elevator and there was scaffolding, and that they had to be on the 15th floor at the start time of
that job. So if if the start time was 6 a.m., they weren't pulling up and parking a mile away at 6 a.m. They were there earlier to get on, to make sure they could get in that scaffolding up that elevator or walk up 15 flights of stairs to be ready to go at 6 a.m. So that's the other reason why work site tours are so important because they get to take what's being taught in the classroom and what they're
their hearing and then seeing it and learning how to apply it. So I just wanted to make that point. Because Mark does a a really, really good job in his classroom, as do our other instructors across all the pathways. So worksite tours are extremely important to the learning for our students.
Dee Davis (37:05)
I can definitely say having met a number of your students and worked with them on the day of Block Kids, so a bunch of their students came and volunteered to help us out with Block Kids earlier this year. And every single student that I interacted with was polite. They were professional. They were helpful. And as you say, they're not showing up with their head hanging down and, hiding in their hoodies and and whatever. I didn't see any of that.
You mentioned your no boots, no work policy, which is exactly what happens in the real workplace. If you show up to a job site and you don't have appropriate attire, you go home. That's real life. And that's exactly what you're giving these kids, at at this moment.
Marc Finer (37:45)
And not only do you not work, you don't get paid.
Dee Davis (37:47)
Absolutely. And I gotta tell ya, I'm working on this big site with lots of different people from lots of different places and lots of different ages. And that age gap that you mentioned earlier it is a real thing. We got a lot of gray hair on the job because it's a very big job and we need that kind of experience. We got a lot of young folks and not a whole lot in between, as you mentioned. We missed a generation or two of recruiting there. I'm getting grown adults showing up to work unprepared.
And I have to turn them around and send them home. They didn't go through the epic program. And it seems silly and you wouldn't think, somebody my age, I would never dream of showing up to work unprepared, but that's how we were brought in to the industry. I think there's just an awful lot of difference. And so these programs like this that teach these values to the to the younger generations coming up into industry is tremendously important and I think extremely impressive.
Because I don't know that they're gonna get that in very many places these days. if you like what you're hearing, click that like button, share it with a friend. Appreciate that.
Dee Davis (38:54)
Thanks for joining us and join us next week for part two of this awesome episode.
