Education: Academy Exposes Students to Various Careers
For seven years, South Bay high school students have come and gone from San Diego Naval Station, where they learned to weld and explored a variety of other careers.
Now there’s new territory to explore.
Neighboring National Steel and Shipbuilding Co. has agreed to open its doors to another group of South Bay students who will rotate through vocational and academic classes without leaving the premises.
NASSCO will host seniors from the Sweetwater Union High School District in a program dubbed the Waterfront Academy. The school district is recruiting some 60 to 75 incoming seniors for classes that begin in the fall.
The program at the 32nd Street Naval shipyard lets Sweetwater students observe and even participate in a variety of jobs, from retail to clerical to shipyard tasks, said school district spokeswoman Lillian Leopold. The ninth- through 12th-grade visitors still spend the bulk of their time on their school campuses.
On the other side of the fence, NASSCO will host students for the full day. There will be two hours of academics and four hours of vocational classes emphasizing skills like blueprint reading, electrical work, pipefitting, sheet-metal work, shipfitting, rigging and welding.
There will be plenty of crossover between academics and vocational work at the Waterfront Academy. Students will be able to take subjects like mathematics and use them as tools to solve shipbuilding problems.
The arrangement benefits NASSCO, a subsidiary of General Dynamics. Current and future shipbuilding programs, coupled with retirements and normal attrition, means the shipyard will have to hire roughly 1,000 people in the next three or four years, said President Richard Vortmann.
“There are not a lot of people with shipbuilding skills out in the job market,” said NASSCO spokesman Dan Peoples.
After graduation and a 240-hour internship, Waterfront Academy students will qualify for entry-level employment at NASSCO, if it is available. Or they can find another employer, or go on to community college or a university.
The school district, for its part, is trying to help students apply academics to their life after school, Leopold said.
The Sweetwater district has several similar academies exposing students to a variety of careers. These get a good deal of help from local businesses and organizations.
Helping with the Hilltop High Academy of Travel and Tourism are Southwestern College, the U.S. Postal Service, Triple-A, Southwest Airlines, the U.S. Grant Hotel, the city of Chula Vista, SeaWorld San Diego, the San Diego Zoological Society, the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau, All Seasons Inn, Chula Vista Motel Association, Evans Hotels, San Diego Consortium & Private Industry Council, Mobil Oil and Science Applications International Corp.
