By Victoria Merlino
In 17-year-old Dylan Danforth’s classroom, welding masks are a must to ensure that students will not go blind from the ultraviolet light or be burned by sparks. In his two years at Northern Penobscot Tech Region III High School, Danforth said, he has earned numerous certifications in safety and welding and has already joined the U.S. Navy in hopes of becoming a chief engineer on a vessel someday. As he speaks, his classmates tuck into welding stalls where they can safely use their torches. Sparks fly.
Danforth is one of the 180 pupils attending Region III, one of 28 career technical education high school programs in Maine. A visitor on any given day will see students like Danforth drive tractor trailers, climb onto roofs to install shingles, practice phlebotomy and assemble cabinetry, all hoping to use their skills to receive well-paying jobs. Every other day, students will travel to Region III to learn their trade, spending the other days at a regular high school to receive a diploma.
The school and students like Danforth, who lives in East Millinocket, a dying mill town 26 miles from Lincoln, are on the front lines of the economic and social challenges confronting this part of northern Maine. In Penobscot County, the median household income is $44,000, $15,000 less than the national average, and jobs can be hard to come by after the closure of the paper mills that sustained many towns.
As jobs have disappeared, many young people have moved away. With 22 percent of Mainers under the age of 19—one of the lowest percentages in the United States — and one of the highest percentages of people over 65 in the country, Maine cannot afford to lose more of its youth to better positions in more prosperous states. Those who remain, faced with poverty and familial despair, are often reluctant—or unable — to seek opportunities outside their hometowns. Consequently, some of the largest companies in the state say they cannot find enough employees.
Region III is trying to meet that challenge by offering students the technical education they need to enter fast-growing professions in health services, construction and more.
“It’s not tough for graduates out of these programs to get jobs. There are plenty of jobs throughout America — if you have a skill. Everyone wants $15 or $20 an hour and they have no skill set,” said Hugh Porter, student services coordinator and assistant director of Region III.
Of the high school students at Region III, around 60 percent will receive jobs in their chosen fields right after graduation. The most popular concentration at the school is health sciences, a good job in Maine due to the high demand for medical services among the state’s older population. The Maine Center for Workforce Research and Information’s 2014-2024 jobs outlook report projects a 9.5 percent increase of jobs in health care and a 9.4 percent increase in health care support roles.
Some students, such as information technology students, will have to move south, to Portland or out of state.
Region III faces its own challenges. Enrollment is down this year by 20 students—the result of both decreasing population in the area and the longstanding neglect of vocational training in an education-policy environment that, for years, has emphasized college for all. Recent changes to the state’s budgeting process for technical education schools threaten Region III with less funding, something that the school’s director, Mary Hawkes, is trying to reconcile for the 2018-2019 school year. The school will receive less money this year from the state, and must instead ask the surrounding towns to funnel it money along with their youth. She says that prior to this budgeting change, the school had little trouble getting funded.
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Hawkes is attempting to change the perception of technical education from something for people who cannot cut it in college to something anyone can do.
“I like to believe that we made a difference and there’s change, but we still need to continue to change at how people look at career and tech ed. There is a certain about of academic snobbery,” she said.
“We’ve taken efforts to get into high schools, get in to talk to guidance counselor because they’re not saying ‘hey, why don’t you be a millwright, or why don’t you be a welder?’ They’re pushing them toward college and what they the call ‘professional roles,’” said Destiny Demo, senior operational human resources manager at Cianbro, one of the largest employers in construction in the state, hiring 300 to 800 people a year.
Plenty of jobs for students with the right technical certifications are available at companies like Cianbro, which said it suffered from a chronic shortage of new recruits. It hires a few Region III students each year for internships, work experience the school stresses. Cianbro trains its new recruits at the Cianbro Institute, an intensive, paid four-week boot camp that builds skills needed on job sites–but still has difficulty finding people. Partly, it said, that’s because one or two people of every 10 fail Cianbro’s mandatory drug test.
In Maine, just as in other parts of the country, the value of college has become a question as students weigh student loans against a degree that may not get them hired. At the University of Maine at Farmington, job prospects are something students either fret over or try not think about. They watch as the 2014-2024 jobs outlook report sees a decrease in administrative roles by 3.5 percent, a decrease in the arts and media positions by 3.8 percent and a decrease in educational and library jobs by 4.2 percent.
A 2017 study from the student loan refinancing and consolidation group LendEDU found that Mainers usually graduated college with $30,000 worth of debt, the 15th highest amount of debt in the nation.
“I’ve lived here all my life and while I do love it here and I do think it’s a special place in a lot of ways, I don’t think it’s a place that makes itself really hospitable to young people,” says Astra Pierson, 21, an English major and a senior at Farmington. “Which is unfortunate and kind of sad to say, but unless you live in like Portland, or like Bangor, there’s not really a lot of opportunities.
The political response to the college loan and youth employment issues has varied. Congressman Bruce Poliquin, a Republican, introduced a bill in 2016 that would allow employers to contribute to employees’ college education funds similar to how they contribute to a 401K retirement plan. The Democratic challengers to Poliquin–Jared Golden, Craig Olson and Lucas St. Clair–agree that college debt is too crippling for students to manage.
St. Clair, who grew up in a neighboring county to Penobscot, feels that there is a lot of room for the services technical high schools offer in his district. “I think the big challenge is that there’s this marketing breakdown,” he said in an interview. “I think we need to rebrand what a vocational school actually does, and through that branding exercise really be able to emphasize the importance.” St. Clair’s campaign website calls for a re-investment in vocational education and a reduction in college debt through a refinancing program, ideas that appeal to all sides of the educational debate.
For Region III’s Danforth, the future of Maine’s job economy is not a statistic or a political appeal, but a stark reality. He has already joined the Navy, in part to follow the footsteps of his father, a merchant seaman. His father has lived in the state for 18 years, and considers himself a Mainer. Danforth is ecstatic about living in Maine, about the community Maine has and the beauty of the land. However, his town of East Millinocket is, as he said, “kind of dying” after the closure of the mills.
“The state’s kinda going downhill,” he said. “If you stay in this area, you can see how everything is just aging.”
Danforth said he is on the fence about staying in Maine after high school but could see staying if the conditions were right. “I’ve been to a lot of states; Maine is definitely my favorite out of all of them. But I can picture myself in maybe Texas, somewhere warm,” he said, smiling. His classmates’ torches continue to glow.