Faculty Member Celebrates 50 Years of Educating Students

Fifty years ago this January, the current Director of the National Dropout Prevention Center, Dr. Jay Smink, stepped into a classroom for the first time as a teacher in Industrial Arts and Drafting, in a new junior-senior high school in Central Pennsylvania.

At that time, Industrial Arts was mandated for boys, as Home Economics was for girls, and this new school building offered Smink the opportunity to completely build the program from scratch.The shop area with surrounding rooms he entered was totally vacant, so he had to build the entire program-the curriculum, the materials, the instructional strategies, and order all the equipment and tools for the program-and this first challenge became one of many over the years-in his mind, always a wonderful opportunity to be creative.

Industrial Education was part of what was called in those days Vocational Education. At that time, Smink didn't see this as dropout prevention, but his career path led him into this field early on, and today the connection is stronger than ever. Now known as Career & Technical Education (CTE), this educational approach is high on the list of effective dropout prevention. Indeed, the NDPC advocates CTE as one of the 15 Effective Strategies for Dropout Prevention, and is a part of the National Center for Research on CTE, with the University of Louisville and other partners, studying the impact of CTE on the dropout rates.

Smink states that it would be very different stepping inside a CTE classroom today as the instructor; with the advancements made in technology, these classes are hardly recognizable from his early years in education. But some things have remained the same-his belief in the importance of CTE and his desire for new challenges and opportunities to build new programs. It is why Smink came to Clemson University over 20 years ago, to help build the new National Dropout Prevention Center into what it has become today-the nation's leader in dropout prevention.