Future in Progress

Problem: Students don’t know what they want to be when they graduate from high school. Planning for life after high school is not the number one priority and is overlooked by many high school students. Currently, in Pittsburgh and in the United States, there are hundreds of jobs available, however the American workforce is not equipped with the skills needed to do those jobs. Students do not know about the jobs in high demand or the training required to do these jobs. So how can students learn about their interests, and strengths to figure out what they want to do?

Our Proposal As a team, we have brainstormed ideas to help high school students think about their future. We met every Wednesday night to talk about our findings and to brainstorm ideas. Each one of us had a unique role within the team to help us develop our final idea. We combined design and policy methods to produce our findings. After talking to counselors at the Propel school, the director of the Neighborhood alliance, and high school students, we developed tools that helped show us what the priorities of most high school students are, what student’s value when it comes to choosing a job, and how they feel about life after high school. We have come up with a final concept that we think will be useful and could be implemented.

FUTURE IN PROGRESS Future in Progress or FiP for short, is a non-profit organization that works with community non-profits, foundations, businesses, schools, and volunteers. It is the product of primary and secondary research methods. We thought about the things that would incentivize high school students to commit to their future and to start planning for life after high school. FiP came up with a point system that will give students the chance to earn money for taking initiative and participating in activities like career mentoring or taking the PSAT.

Click on the link below to view how the program works:

How does the program work?

Below are the links for our poster boards:

Final Concept 1

Final Concept 2  

Future in Progress will help students on their journey to find a career that they enjoy so that they can be successful. -Ana Vazquez-Trejo, Molly Johnson, Alex Krysiak, Robyn Hammond, Salwa Al-Mannai

“Beautiful Places make Beautiful Kids”

Blog Submission Design and Policy Course

By: Ana Vazquez-Trejo

 

I heard this quote as I was sitting in Heinz college during a presentation by Bill Strickland,^[1] an influential community leader that happens to have his own Wikipedia page. I sat and wondered is this true? I continued to listen as he talked about the school he built for inner city kids in Pittsburgh. He mentioned that the school he built has not had an incident with kids causing trouble like the school down the street. He displayed some beautiful pictures of the entrance of the school with a fountain, that reminded me of the entrance of a corporation in downtown Houston.

If I think about the places I have studied and worked, I think Bill might actually be true, “Beautiful Places make Beautiful ‘People.’”I think Bill meant “beautiful places” are comfortable, sophisticated, clean, and state of the art facilities. I think that Bill meant “Beautiful Kids” were productive, prudent, conscientious, hard-working people. If you think about institutions like Carnegie Mellon, it has state of the art facilities and the most modern technology access for its students.  According to the CMU fact sheet, “In the past 15 years, CMU faculty, students and alumni have created more than 300 companies and 9,000 jobs.^[2]” CMU is a good example of “Beautiful Places make Beautiful Kids.” However, CMU is such a small community, why can’t others have access to state of the art facilities and learn how to use life- changing technologies? In addition, how do workplaces, study places, or environment influence a person’s creativity?

According to the Houston Chronicle, motivation plays a large role in productivity.^[3] Even more in the Journal of Business, Economics, & Finance, “The quality of environment in workplace may simply determine the level of employee’s motivation, subsequent performance and productivity.^[4]” So as Americans, why are we surprised that the national High School graduation rate is 78.2%.^[5] What about that other 21.8% of students?  How can we regain these High School dropouts? Why did they not graduate? Why can’t we have a 100% graduation rate to complete the most fundamental level of education? I have a theory that it is based on school environment, facilities, and access to technology.

According the national center for education and statistics, “In 1998, the average public school building in the United States was 42 years old.”^[6]  If our kids do not have access to good infrastructure as simple as the classroom they attend, why would they care?

I think that it is a variety of things that influence a single person’s ability to complete different levels of education. One of those things is environment. Placing a person in a healthy, “beautiful,” encouraging environment helps increase a person’s ability to achieve more education. So how can we design a policy that will help America’s kids?

---

^[1] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/events/event-detail/index.aspx?eid=3059

^[2] http://www.cmu.edu/about/cmufactsheet.pdf

^[3] http://smallbusiness.chron.com/motivation-productivity-workplace-10692.html

^[4] http://www.jbef.org/archive/pdf/volume1/4-demet%20leblebici.pdf

^[5] http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/infographics/graduation-rates-stats-infographic.html

^[6] http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/1999048/

Maternity Leave

I wanted to research maternity leave in different organizations and entities. I found the following:

Institution	Maternity Leave	Leave of Absence Policy	Policy: FMLA requires employers to provide 4 week paid of the 12 week parental leave.	Job Protected?
Carnegie Mellon	No	Yes	Maternity leave after the birth of a child is covered concurrently under Short Term Disability and FMLA for staff, or as a Faculty Parental Leave for faculty.”	Yes, 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for certain family and medical reasons
Harvard	Yes	yes	Up to 4 weeks paid leave for new parents who are primary care givers, up to 12 weeks(FMLA)	Family leave of up to 13 weeks for birth, adoptive or foster parents.
Federal Government	No	Yes	Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act of 2009: To provide that 4 of the 12 weeks of parental leave made available to a Federal employee shall be paid leave, and for other purposes.	Yes
State Level:depends on org size	No official policy	Yes	FMLA	Yes
Google	Yes	Yes	New moms working at Google get five months of paid maternity leave	yes

I learned that entities adopt policies that are set by the Federal government. In this case, the minimum of 4 weeks paid leave is complied with because of federal policy. This is extremely interesting because usually after birth a woman is medically recovered after 6 weeks.

The places that have been innovative and extended leave are the technical busineses like Google and facebook. It may be a matter of profit that determines the total amount of leave an employee gets. I think that maternity paid leave should be extended to more than 4 weeks and that the federal government should adopt a longer paid leave.The US could adopt creative leave strategies like those of the following countries:

Switzerland has 16 weeks of maternity leave with 80% paid leave

Germany: 14 weeks of leave, with 100% paid leave

United Kingdom has 52 weeks of leave with 90% paid leave.

Is it possible that there is injustice in the American System when it comes to maternity leave? Could the United States adopt a better policy? Could the United States afford a longer paid leave? Does the amount of  paid leave affect employee morale?