Williams advocates for CTE program

Congressman Roger Williams, R-Austin, said he hopes Congress will consider legislation he has sponsored that would provide funding to individuals and small businesses who hire graduates from accredited career and technical education programs.

“We have a bill called HR3366 (Supporting Small Business and Career and Technical Education Act of 2021), a career and technical education bill, that allows for businesses and schools to obtain federal grants that will help educate some of these kids who want to be plumbers and welders,” Williams said of the bill he and co-sponsor Marie Williams, D-Illinois, introduced in May.

“I’ve always been supportive of having not so many lawyers and there are a lot of kids in Texas alone dropping out of school in the ninth grade — 100,000 kids a year dropping out of school because they are losing hope since they can’t be a lawyer, an architect, a business guy, a journalist or whatever. But we are in dire need in Texas and across the country of trade skills — carpenters, plumbers, welders, etc.

“As you know, some of those jobs start out pretty good and during this last cold spell (Winter Storm Uri), none of us called our lawyers. We called our plumber or welder to help get us out of this problem and nobody asked ‘how much are you going to charge me?’”

HR 3366 amends the Small Business Act to include requirements relating to graduates of career and technical education programs or programs of study for small business development centers and women’s business centers, and for other purposes.

The bill, which Williams introduced in the House on May 20, was referred to the Committee on Small Business, of which Williams is the vice ranking member, as well as the Committee on Education and Labor.

Newman represents District 3 in Illinois, which includes southwestern Chicago as well as many of its nearby suburbs such as Oak Lawn, Western Springs and Lockport.

“This is a bipartisan bill — something you don’t hear much about in Washington,” Williams said. “There is probably not much (Newman) and I agree on, but we do agree on this and we agree on kids, jobs and skill set jobs. I hope we get this taken up by Speaker Pelosi and voted on.”

Williams said he “grew up in an era where everybody went to college, but not everybody needs to go to college.

“Not everybody is fit to go to college, but they may be fit to learn a trade, start their own business and hire one of their buddies. That’s never going to go away,” Williams said. “Bertram, Texas, has 7,500 new homes being built and we’re going to need people to build these houses and people to plumb them.

“In Texas, we have so much going on that we can’t come short of those trade skills because then our circle doesn’t have a close to it. When I was Secretary of State under Governor Perry, we lost a billion-dollar capital investment down on the coast because we didn’t have enough welders. I will always remember that.”

According to the U.S. Department of Education, there are 30 million jobs in the United States that do not require a bachelor’s degree that pay median earnings of $55,000 or more.

“A critical workforce challenge in the United States is the skills gap, particularly among jobs that require either a high school diploma, postsecondary certificate, or associate’s degree,” according to a press release by the U.S. Department of Education. “Jobs requiring these ‘middle skills’ outnumber the adults in the workforce who possess them, and this gap presents a barrier to American economic competitiveness.”

A second bill introduced by Williams is H. R. 3365, which would require the Secretary of Education to disclose information about career and technical education and funding under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006, and require FAFSA applications to include a career and technical education acknowledgment. That bill also was referred to the C

CTE education typically takes a shorter amount of time to complete and costs less than traditional post-secondary education. With 16 different high-skilled, high-demand career fields of study, CTE can take between six months and two years to complete, compared to a traditional four-year bachelor’s degree.

Meanwhile, the average cost for a career and technical education program is $3,000 to $6,000 per year, while the average cost for an in-state, public four-year institution is more than $25,000 per year.

Texas high schools are at the forefront of CTE, with more than 1.6 million Texas students enrolled in at least one secondary CTE course. Of that amount, more than half (826,000) are CTE concentrators — students who have completed at least two course credits in a single career and technical education (CTE) subject, according to the student’s high school transcript.

Ninety-six percent of all CTE concentrators graduate high school, while 70 percent do go on to post-secondary education. While the majority of students enrolled in CTE courses are male, the gap between genders is closing, with males making up 52.3 percent and females making up 47.7 percent.

Marble Falls High School has long been known for fostering CTE programs among its students. CTE course offerings at MFHS include agricultural science; construction technology; hospitality and tourism; arts, A/V technology and communications; business; health science technology; human services; information technology (IT) and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math).