ERIK SANZENBACH / L’Observateur / May 30, 2000

RESERVE – Sometimes it really pays to answer one of those pesky surveys.

For Debbie McBrayer of Reserve, answering a survey from the St. JohnSchool Board earned her two round-trip airline tickets to be used for any destination within the contiguous United States.

Not bad for five minutes of her time.

The St. John School Board doesn’t usually run contests, but School-to-CareerCoordinator Beverly Harris was desperate to get parents to respond to her survey.

“We had to know if parents were aware of the school-to-career program,” said Harris, “and we figured a contest would be a good way to urge parents to be in the survey.”The school-to-career program is run by a curriculum committee made of community leaders, educators, military personnel and members of the Louisiana Department of State. To keep the program solvent, this committeemust submit reports to the state every year, and this report must contain surveys from the parents and students.

Harris says that the state mandates that all students have a career major in high school.

Back in 1997, the Louisiana State Legislature passed Act 1134. This actmandated that all school districts must provide sixth, seventh and eighth graders with career information. In the eighth grade, students must thenform a five-year career plan using this information. When they get to highschool, the student must select a career major. This career can be pickedfrom four major areas: fine arts and humanities; business and marketing; health and human services and technical and industrial.

“This keeps kids jumping from one major to another in college,” said Harris.

“We use job-shadowing, teacher-shadowing and counseling to see whether a student is interested or not in a certain career.”Toni Meyer, president and CEO of Riverlands Travel Center Inc. and theperson who donated the prize of two airline tickets is a very enthusiastic about career training in our local schools.

“I would like to encourage all businesses in the area to participate in job and teacher shadowing,” said Meyer In order to get the parents to answer the committee’s survey, Harris sent out 1,600 letters to the parents of high school students with the survey.

The letters stated that if the survey was returned by March 15, the parent would be eligible for the contest to win two round-trip airline tickets.

The completed surveys would be put in a barrel, and St. John SchoolSuperintendent, Chris Donaldson would draw out the lucky winner.

The plan worked, because Harris got a lot of response to her survey. Thegood news was a majority of parents were aware of the school-to-career program, and they were very much in favor of it.

The even-better news for McBrayer was that she won two free airline tickets.

McBrayer has a personal stake in the school-to-career program. At thistime, she has four children attending East St. John High School. She also hasa daughter who just graduated from a nursing program, thanks to the school-to-career program.

McBrayer has big plans for her airline tickets.

“I’m going to visit the New England states for the fall,” she said.

Return To News Stories