Building Career and Technical Education Programs That Actually Match Local Workforce Needs

The Wilson Academy of Applied Technology took two years and required me to abandon my original idea entirely.

Wilson County, North Carolina sat at the intersection of two realities that public schools rarely figure out how to bridge. The county had a thriving manufacturing sector, anchored by major pharmaceutical companies including Purdue, BD, Merck, and Sandoz. Their plant managers were visible community figures, sponsors of school events, people who showed up. At the same time, those companies were quietly struggling to find and keep qualified employees for skilled technical jobs. Younger workers and young families were migrating toward larger cities, and Wilson's labor market was becoming a liability in an otherwise attractive location for manufacturers.

I came into that situation with an idea that was more right than I realized, and also more wrong in its specifics than I was prepared to admit. Getting from the first version of the idea to something that actually worked required listening to people who understood things I did not.

The Idea, and What Was Wrong With It

I had become genuinely impressed by the Early College High School model before I arrived in Wilson County. The district already had one operating when I started, and watching students earn college credits alongside their high school diplomas convinced me the model had untapped potential. The question was whether we could build a second early college around the needs of the local manufacturing sector.

My first instinct about what that school should produce was wrong. Knowing that the dominant industry was pharmaceutical manufacturing, I assumed the gap was scientists, specifically biologists and chemists. I started sketching a program around that assumption before I had talked to anyone who actually ran one of those plants.

Fortunately, I caught myself before we built anything. I reached out to colleagues at the Chamber of Commerce and the community college to discuss how to approach the project, and from there I organized a learning tour of the manufacturing facilities. I visited with plant managers and local operations leaders, who were generous with their time in ways I had not anticipated.

What they told me reshaped everything. None of the scientific research happened in Wilson County. The pharmaceutical facilities there were manufacturing operations, and what the plant managers needed were people who could design, operate, and maintain technology-driven assembly lines. The gap was not in the lab. It was on the floor.

Building Something Together

We assembled a design team drawn from the school system, the community college, and the manufacturing sector. Their task was to identify a program of study, design the curriculum, and think through what it would take to launch and equip a school capable of delivering it. They settled on advanced manufacturing and mechatronics. Students in this new early college would earn their high school diplomas while earning an associate's degree.

At one point during the planning, I intervened. The team had drafted a course sequence that included no hands-on technical work in the first year. From an academic planning standpoint, I understood the logic. But I knew the students we were trying to reach. These were young people choosing a non-traditional path specifically because they wanted to do something different from a conventional academic program. Asking them to spend an entire year before touching the work that brought them there was a risk I was not willing to take.

I sent the team back to revise it. The final sequence included at least one hands-on class every semester, starting on the first day.

The manufacturing partners never wrote the large checks I had privately hoped for when the project began. That turned out to be fine. What they contributed instead was something harder to purchase. They used the networks of their international parent corporations to source recently replaced industrial equipment that would have been prohibitively expensive to acquire through any other channel. The school was equipped in ways a grant alone could not have achieved.

Getting It Across the Finish Line

I identified a founding principal early in the process and gave her the authority to lead the planning and drive the project forward. That decision mattered more than I can fully account for. There were several moments when the effort could have stalled, and each time, she found a way through. We applied for a grant from the North Carolina Golden Leaf Foundation, a process that involved significant scrutiny and multiple rounds of review. Her persistence through that process was the reason we got the grant.

We ultimately repurposed an underenrolled wing of a rural high school to house the academy as a separate school within the building. It took a little over two years from the initial idea to welcoming the first class of students in the fall of 2016.

I did not get to see the school open. I left the district in the spring before the first students arrived.

What the School Became

The Wilson Academy of Applied Technology graduated its first class in the spring of 2020. By that point, the school had already outgrown its original space. It moved to a new facility adjacent to the community college, in a building donated by a local business owner. It has now operated for ten years, built by the sustained commitment of the community partners who came together to create it.

I think often about what the project taught me about the gap between a superintendent's ideas and what a community actually needs. I had the general idea, which was that a school connecting students to the local economy could serve both students and employers. But the specific form that idea needed to take was not mine to determine. The plant managers knew what their operations required. The design team knew how to build a curriculum. The founding principal knew how to move an institution. My job was to start the conversation, stay out of the way when others knew more, and make one or two decisions that only the superintendent could make.

That combination is harder than it sounds, and it is the work.

 

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.