NATPL FORUM

Got to Louisville yesterday and completed the registration and all that goes with that. Tonight I thought that I would share some of the happenings in Louisville at the conference this year.

Today was the National Association of Tech Prep Leadership Forum. The forum is held before the NCPN conference and a good opportunity to get some insight into Tech Prep.

We heard form Marty Mahler, P-16 Coordinator for Nebraska, and his presentation "Tech Prep, Back to the Future." It was interesting and he talked about preparing a workforce for the world economy and how we should not want to be competing in a global economy, we should want to lead. He also talked about why we should be concerned with students earning their bachelor degrees by referencing that for every one engineer in the state of Nebraska, they create 7 new "tech" jobs and that for a 1% of increase in bachelor degrees earned they can track a correlating increase in all wages, high school drop out, high school, associates degree and bachelors!

The rest of the day was all about data. Sheila Ruhland from North Carolina spoke about the NATPL Quality Indicators and accountability. After lunch and the awards it was Performance Measures/Data Collection by Dennis Fiscus of Arizona and Tony Landis from Ohio. Again, we got good information to bring back and compare to what we are doing in Oklahoma. The last session was a State Directors break out and a discussion about where we were as states, what we need help with, etc. Wrap it up with some door prizes and call it a day!!

Tomorrow will be another full day and I will get some stuff out about what we did! Remember, if you are from Oklahoma we will have our state meeting at 1:15 in Room 201, see you then.