7th graders from the Utica City School District visited SUNY Polytechnic Institute on 5/9 and 5/10 for the district’s first annual CTE/STEM Expo. Students were introduced to various career fields related to the new Career and Technical Education (CTE) pathways that will be available at Proctor High School by the fall of 2025.
The UCSD CTE department collaborated with higher education and over 40 industry partners from the region to promote authentic learning experiences. The goal was to create interactive booths to excite students about the CTE pathways that will be available to them, provide career awareness and exposure, and engage students in interactive, hands-on experiences to create a vision of what their future career could be. Business partners were very impressed with how engaged students were and their performance as they tried various activities throughout the day. 
Utica City School District will break ground at Proctor High School during the spring of 2024 in preparation for the new CTE addition that will house 12 pathways. Each was selected based on local stakeholder input. CTE pathways will offer a rigorous career-focused curriculum paired with a range of industry and higher education partnerships providing opportunities for internships, mentoring, job shadowing, and college-level coursework. The district-wide approach of CTE implementation K-12 will help prepare students in Central New York for jobs in the region’s growing industries including: advanced manufacturing, skilled trades, health professions, cybersecurity, finance, education and more.

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