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Scott’s Precision Machining & Manufacturing Technology Course

By Fletcher Word
Sojourner’s Truth Editor

A half dozen years ago, when the current Toledo Public Schools administration assumed control of the district – led by Superintendent Romules Durant, EdD – their mission was obvious: stop the bleeding.

The district was losing students, the students who stayed with the district were graduating at an appallingly low rate and, with the loss of students, state funding was dropping precipitously.

The new administration, faced with the dilemma of how to attract more students to TPS and how to keep them in school, recognized that not all of the district’s students or graduates would be entering college and majoring in English lit or sociology. How then would a high school education remain relevant and prepare for life those not headed to college?
 


Teacher David Dowling explains the Prototrak


Scott Senior Mordecai Mosby

The answer was to expand the district’s mission by ensuring its students were either college ready or career ready and to make this mission a reality, in the course of the last half dozen years, TPS has become the most comprehensive school district in northwest Ohio, notes the information in its literature – offering more than 35 career technology options, along with its advanced placement courses, its foreign language choices and its various associate degrees.

One of those career technology options is available at Jesup W. Scott High School in David Dowling’s classroom where, for the last four years, he has taught precision machining and manufacturing technology to 10th through 12th graders.

The precision machining program instructs students on engineering concepts, metal lathes, milling machines, digital readouts, drill presses, surface grinders, computer numerical control machines, among other industrial craft tools. The program prepares students for careers as millwrights, mechanical engineers, CNC operator/programmers, robotics, precision machinists, die cast die makers, tool & die makers, mold makers, punch press operators and quality control supervisors.

Dowling arrived as a teacher in the Scott precision machining technology program with the precise background needed for such a calling.

A Whitmer graduate, he studied machine trades at Owens Community College in the late 1990s and mechanical engineering at North Central State College in the early 2000s and worked at Dana Corporation for a decade as a quality technician, in engineering and machining and as a quality manager before abruptly changing careers and returning to college at the University of Toledo to earn a bachelors in  middle-childhood education and high needs education.

He joined TPS as a math and science teacher after a stint at Horizon Science Academy. Durant plucked him from Ottawa River Elementary for Scott so that he could create the program and prepare students for industry.

Between 15 and 20 students in each of the sophomore, junior and senior classes are part of the precision machining program, says Dowling. “We’ve had a lot of success,” he says of the student involvement. “We are doing something right and we’ve had a lot of support from the District.”

However, the program’s success is not reflected simply in the growing numbers of student participants and Dowling is something more than a classroom instructor. He’s also a recruiter, and a bit of a salesman. As he sees it, part of his job is to be out recruiting companies and selling them on the virtues  and capabilities of Scott students.

When he’s not at the school instructing his charges on the finer points of machining, he’s out in the community and business world seeking placement opportunities for his students – internships and job placements – “quality experiences,” he says.

He has worked with numerous local companies and staffing agencies to provide mentoring to students, to “update and upgrade equipment” in the machining shop and to place the students in jobs – good paying jobs, in fact.

“There are lots of opportunities – people are begging for their skills and there is a huge gap in the skilled labor force,” says Dowling.

It’s not just the immediate workforce for which Dowling is preparing his students. Some, like Mordecai Mosby, a senior who has taken three years of precision machining, will be headed to college where those skills will help with a number of career paths in the long run. Mosby has been accepted to Kansas University where he plans on studying architectural drawing.

The impact on the district of these new programs – the wider range of choices – has been dramatic. Since 2014, according to the Ohio Department of Education Report card, TPS has seen a 16 percent increase in the four-year graduation rate and an increase in student enrollment of about 1,800 students after the numbers had been steadily decreasing for several decades.

“The world needs makers, builders, programmers – technical types,” says Dowling of the impact Scott’s program is having … on the world!
 

 

   


Copyright © 2019 by [The Sojourner's Truth]. All rights reserved.
Revised: 10/10/19 09:55:02 -0400.


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