Transcript:

00:00 Hello, this is Melissa Hale-Spencer, the editor of the Altamont Enterprise here today with a business teacher par excellence. Joan Mcgrath. Welcome Joan. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Well, I am just so excited to have you here. Um, because I had a very old fashioned idea of what business education was and recently Joan called our paper as I assume she does with other local businesses to see if a student might come and intern. And I just thought we've had our, in our pages, people have seen her getting awards from the school district or from Ithaca College. She was recently got the market maker Business Award and I went online and I looked up with the rate. My teacher, her students love her. They all say very similar things. She's tough, but she's fair. She makes you learn things that you don't think you're going to need.

01:02 And when you get out in the real world, you're ready. So I'd like to start just by finding out a little about yourself. Tell us how you grew up and what was your journey to get to being a business teacher. Okay. Well, so, um, I started my career actually in finance. Um, I'm originally from Long Island, but I went to Sienna College. I graduated from Sienna with a degree in business and moved down to back home. And let's just here Sienna, what drew you to Sienna? It's a gem of a little college, but I imagine on long island it isn't like a big name. Well actually there are quite a few people from long island that go to Sienna. It's, um, actually from when I went, there were probably, I would say maybe 30% or more of the students came from downstate as opposed to just upstate.

02:05 Um, so there were lots of us from Long Island area, uh, that went to Sienna and um, I was drawn to it, came up and did a visit and loved the atmosphere, the sense of community, the values. And I just met people that I really connected with and I loved, loved it there. So I went to Sienna and actually, um, met my future husband there. And, uh, we've been married now for 26 years, I think, 27 years almost. And, uh, I noticed on your Twitter account, you discipline yourself, his wife, mom, and then teacher. So that must be very important to you. Well, yes it is. So when I went to see, and I, after graduating I moved back down to long island, worked in the city for a couple of years in my husband and I kept dating. He also was a CNO Grad graduate. And, um, then we finally decided, okay, well we aren't going to get married and we were looking at where we want to decide to live.

03:10 And um, I loved the upstate area. I loved Albany. Um, and we decided that I would move up here and I continued to work in finance. I worked for key Corp, um, for probably, Gosh, 12 years. I worked for a Q corp. So I worked in finance and business for 15 years and I worked for key Corp for 12 and the teachers as people who go to college and study education. But you studied business or finance. And then I got my masters, I got my master's from sage. Um, loved that experience as well. My teachers there were fantastic. And what was nice about that was as I was going through my graduate work, I was still, I was working in finance, everything that I was doing in my graduate work, it was like the textbook and real life we're meshing. Um, everything I was learning in my academic world was being applied in my work experience on a daily basis.

04:14 So that was really great. It was a fantastic way to learn because what I was learning academically was being applied on a daily basis. So then I, uh, was working in finance for key, loved that experience, but I worked for, uh, the, the finance arm of a key corp and it involved a fair amount of travel and different things, which was fantastic. But when I had my kids, um, I needed a little bit better balance. I just have to, um, and um, they're great. I love my kids. My husband, we're, you know, it was great. Um, they are, my son is a sophomore at Binghamton and he's, uh, in, uh, the PWC scholars program in Bay at Binghamton and business and following his mothers and fathers. Yeah. And dads. And then my daughter is a senior at Gilgal and this year and she's looking to go into physical therapy.

05:16 So, um, so when I'm old, she'll take care of me, my, my subtle manage our finances. My daughter will take care of making sure we're in good health. Well, so it was becoming a mother that made you decide to switch careers a little bit. So in my business career, one of the things that I routinely did as I mentored people and um, as I moved up the, um, I guess corporate ladder, if you will, um, at every stage I found myself working with trying to teach people things that I had mastered or have learned and um, felt that it would be beneficial to other people. And so when I was a key Corp, one of the things that my group created was we created a, an internship program on the business side. And then we also created a whole training department that was subsequently implemented within the whole finance company.

06:15 And then when I started evaluating, like getting this better balance, um, and thinking, wow, well, what are the things that I liked about my business career? One of the things that I really enjoyed was helping people to learn things. So then I looked into going back to school and I'm getting my certification to teach because I still identified with myself as a professional, as a, as a, as, as a businessperson and having a career. And so even though my, my, um, life was changing and going from just being a mom and a wife and a business person now, I'm now a wife, a mom and a businessperson. So I needed to sort of fit all of that stuff in. And, um, so I thought, well, I really, really love helping people to learn new things. So I went back and got my certification back to Sienna and, um, became a teacher.

07:14 And so then I taught business because I had my experience in business and your students. Yeah, that kind of experience. I think it really is. And I tell my students that every, every new class of students that I get, I'm like, I'm there for you, what I spent 15 years doing. You have the benefit of, um, of experiencing through me because I can help you with things. I can help you with things that maybe other teachers can't because they have only been in an academic, um, role. Uh, so, so I work with students all the time. As a matter of fact, I just got an email from a student yesterday to ask if I could be a mentor for him and his partners. One of the other things that I do now is I help with that startup high school program with students who have a business idea or a product idea.

08:09 They, uh, we created that last year with our student are enough. Um, cannon who, um, I think you guys had a couple of articles in your newspaper. Yes. Tell the people that are listening that hadn't read those stories. Just to kind of in a nutshell how that works. So one of my former students are enough, was interested. He had gone out to Michigan and done this program out in Michigan called startup high school where students just come and they have an opportunity to learn about, um, like pitching a business idea. And so he went to this, had a phenomenal experience and wanted to try to bring that back and share that with students here in the capital district. So he approached me to see if we could try to create a startup high school in New York, in the capital district for students throughout the capital district.

09:05 And um, Arnov myself and Robert [inaudible] from U Albany puts together a program and we did our first startup high school, New York last January. And, um, it was, uh, you know, it was a huge success. It was wonderful. Some of the ideas were amazing, amazing things that these kids thought of fantastic ideas. And so, uh, our NAUV is doing fantastic. He's at Washu and, um, he has content. He wants us to continue to, to, you know, um, do the startup high school in New York. And so Bob and I and our Knauff from afar, and now I'm bringing up two new sets of student, uh, to new students from Guilderland who are interested in helping to continue it. Because our motto with Startup High School was, um, it was created by high school students for high school students. So we're continuing that by bringing in a couple of new ha, uh, new students, Su Han, Suresh and um, nick, uh, is also helping us out.

10:11 Um, another young boy and, um, Nick's hands. Uh, and um, so we're continuing it and we have, our next event is going to be on March 2nd over at U Albany. And, um, the center for economic growth loved our model so much and they, they had students from our startup high school participate in this, the center's program over at Sianna last year. And they found that our students with the best prepared to present their pitches for their business. And I'm, so the center for economic growth has asked us to, um, Kinda do ours in conjunction with theirs. So we're kind of working with them as well. And yeah, yeah, yeah.

10:55 Looking at a list of the things that you do. I'm just, it seems like you must think about students in their entirety because one of the things we also wrote about, but I wish you could talk a bit about, because everyone that listens, he doesn't necessarily read our paper. You and Heidi Cutler started this program for kids that usually get free lunches at school. Um, so that over the weekend they can take home food in a backpack. And just tell us a little about how that even occurred to you and why.

11:30 Well, so Heidi and I were brainstorming some ideas because um, what had happened was there was, there were some things going on a few years ago back at school and um, we had gone and seen the, the mission over in Schenectady. They have a backpack program and um, we talked with them a little about doing something for what you call basically food insecure people and are among our most needy in our whole entire country are our students are students, they're food insecure. They have options during the week when they're going to school because they have the free and reduced lunch. But then maybe on weekends there's not really a lot there for them. And so we talked about it and, um, we decided that we would take more of our own approach to the program. And so what we did is we created a program at the high school where, um, we utilize our students in our school to work program as an in, um, in, in school, um, work based learning opportunity.

12:42 We give them, um, some time in their schedule to help us out with the, the backpack program. So we get donations from the community and um, the Gilda and community has been phenomenal and providing both food donations and monetary support, um, for the program. We've had some really truly wonderful people that have helped us out and we have volunteers every single week who helped go pick up the food for our program, um, up at the region up at the regional food bag. So we were getting our school to work program kicked off at that same time. And we thought, well this would be a great way to provide our students who are in the school to work program. Um, tell us a little about what that is. Okay. The school. Okay. So we decided we would bring the school to work students together with the backpack program and they help us with, um, organizing, inventorying and then packing the backpacks, um, on a weekly basis.

13:47 And you know, our community volunteers and our community donors help to support it in terms of funding and the delivery of, um, the, the food to us. Um, and then the kids go home with a backpack full of food every week. Um, that helps to supplement things that they might not have otherwise. In addition to the nutritional boost, which is all important. It would just make them psychologically feel good. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Just mentioning the school to work, if you could kind of fill. Sure. Um, so the school to work program is, um, for our students that have some salt, some form of a learning disability or other type of disability and in their individual education plan have, um, a work based learning component to their education. And so we used to outsource that area of their education to an outside agency and we still partner with that as outside agency.

14:47 Um, quite a bit with support for job coaches and the like. Um, but we decided that we would take that inside and do it internally, um, at the high school because we needed to make sure that, um, there was a continuum of support for the students. So what we did is we created like a, uh, a three tier component to this work based learning. Um, and really what we overall culture transitions for students. So, uh, internally myself and then another person, Michelle Martin up at the high school, she focuses on the transitions piece and helping the students to be able to transition to once they graduate or leave guilt on them. What types of things would they qualify either for services or, um, what would they end up doing, whether it be be a collegiate or going to work or whatever. She helps to coordinate that.

15:43 And then I, along with some other teachers in the school do the work based learning and that provides them with some sort of work training, employment training and um, and, and also some life skills types of things. We also pair that with um, an in classroom experience. And so that's really the real add value. They go out, they are learning out in the workplace, but then they come back to school and in the classroom we work on the skills that they're really applying out in the workplace. So anything that can be, anything from soft skills like communication, interpersonal skills, I'm good hygiene, um, time management being, you know, being on time, being punctual. Um, interpersonal skills, like attitude and motivation, any of those types of things that maybe for other people might come a little bit easier. We work on those things with them. We also help them to do career research.

16:45 What types of things do you like? What are your interests? How could they be applied in a work setting? Um, so we, we work with the kids on all of those types of things and then we tried to help them find work experiences that will help them to build their skills and make them ready to be able to go out and get jobs. And these, and these kids really, they just, they want to be able to feel valued just like everybody else and they want to find their fit in life. Um, just like everybody else. And so we're helping to provide them with the opportunity to find that fit and then help the community to know that there is a fit for all these, these people, all these kids, you know that as they're coming up, there's a right place for everybody because work is so essential and defining who you are and fitting into society.

17:39 So are you feeling valued? Are you looking for businesses to do this? Some of these listening and thinks this might be a fit for them. Who would they contact? They can contact me, they can contact me through the job. Uh, they can contact me up at the high school. They can either send me an email, it, should I say my email McGrath j Guilderland schools.net. Or they can call the high school. My number at the high school is five one eight, eight six one eight five, nine one extension one zero two, one. They can do either. Um, they can also just call the high school and, um, uh, you know, ask for me and they'll, they'll transfer me a, transfer them to me. Great. So yeah, we've got great businesses that have been involved. Um, you know, up here in altenmarkt we've had like Altima auto agway.

18:33 Um, I'm trying to think who else. Oh, Bella floor has done an internship with us for our internship program. Um, we've had like tractor supply and um, then fitness, the library, the why. Uh, we have a new placement at the residence inn over on Washington avenue extension, um, short and stout tea. They, yeah, they've, um, they've come on board this this past year and um, you know, they're, they've mentored a couple of students who are find placements for a couple of our students. Um, feefee's consignment shops, lots of, lots of lots and lots of businesses that have a lot of effort, all those messages. But I'd also like it if you could talk about, um, the curriculum because as I said when I started this podcast, um, for those of us that have gray hair, you have great, I have lots of gray hair business classes were almost entirely female and they involved learning things like shorthand and typing as opposed to, and I had a list of the courses you teach.

19:52 They just amazing. Yeah. When you do this presentation for the school board, one of the students that came back from college talked about things he had learned in your class that allowed them to pay for his own college, but becoming in essence a landlord. So I mean it's, it's not your grandmother's business program. If you could just kind of tell us, um, the kinds of things that your department teaches. And also the kind of technology you're using. I think it would really be an eye opener for people. Yeah. So in terms of course is what one of the nice things in business is that we do offer a very, very wide variety of courses. Uh, you know, it's nice that it's diverse and that's really because that's what students are students. There's no one cookie cutter model for what a student might be interested in exploring.

20:47 So the diversity of our courses is very wide. Uh, we have many, many college courses in our curriculum and our, um, pardon me course offering and, uh, we offer our college accounting or regular level, uh, a full year entry level accounting program. We offer a Biz, a college level business law. We offer a college marketing. Um, we um, just created a social media marketing course for next year and a, we offer an entrepreneurship course. We offer, um, a hospitality man internship course, which is for students that are looking to explore a career in, uh, uh, explore career and help them to try to decide is this something I would like to do in life? And I had students that have gone through the internship program and said, yes, this is absolutely what I would like to do. Um, I've, I've loved it. And then I've had students who have done internships and been like, class.

21:50 Uh, so there's, you know, different, different class levels depending upon the needs of the students. So, um, you know, so there's lots of different variety. We also have, like I said, these classes that are for the students that are in the work based learning and we have an internship course, which is for students that are looking to explore a career in, uh, uh, explore career and help them to try to decide, is this something I would like to do in life? And I've had students that have gone through the internship program and said, yes, this is absolutely what I would like to do. Um, I've, I've loved it. And then I've had students who have done internships and been like, oh, this is not what I thought it was. And when that's very valuable to it is so valuable. College career in the wrong direction.

22:39 Correct. Right. And, and so I look at it and I tell them that's a win. It is absolutely a win because you can refocus before you go out there and spend a lot of money and decided something that you're not interested in. So the internship is a internship program is a phenomenal opportunity for students. And again, that's the same type of thing where we go out and we find businesses, local businesses who would be willing to provide somebody that would, you know, mentor our, our students. Um, in the work based learning, we have a job coach that goes out and works with the students and guides them there on a daily basis. But on the internship side, the interns are there, independent students and they're pretty pretty much going out there and um, their mentors, their primary source for feedback and direction and the like, uh, so, and that's, you know, great experience for them.

23:33 We have a third work based learning opportunity for students, which we don't often do in our department. Would like to see more students involved, are enrolled in that and it's called work experience program. And it's for students who already have a job, maybe an entry level job, maybe they work in price chopper, maybe they work in Burger King or some place in the mall. And um, they go and they do their work based, their work, their employment, but then they also take a class at the high school, um, that needs one or two times a week. And, um, they, the class really just focuses on the softer skills, like the, what we call the employability skills. And sometimes our students are a little bit lacking in that area because that's something that maybe isn't, um, emphasized every place else in, in their academic world. And, um, you know, sometimes, you know, kids just don't pick up on the appropriate cues like how important it is to be punctual or how important it is to have good interpersonal skills and how to resolve a conflict and how to be a good team player and what does it mean to be self motivated and all those little things that really differentiate a student, you know, from being an okay employee to being a good employee who can get promoted in advance.

25:06 It just the idea that you can isolate those things and teach them, I know your department did a survey of local businesses and this was several years ago and I don't know if it's changed, but the first rated skill that they said that they wanted from employees was personal responsibility followed by time management skills by oral and written communication is, and I think so often in high schools, um, teachers are so geared towards the subject matter that they don't think of teaching those things. So I wonder is that still what you're finding? It absolutely is. Um, maybe there's little shift. There's, it seems lately that there's an increased, um, emphasis on communication and that might have a little bit to do with the fact that our thumbs get a lot of exercise nowadays with texting and the like, um, and compute, you know, computers, we were email and things like that. So, uh, it seems a little bit of a shift still for sure. Um, personal responsibility, time management and interpersonal skills are, are certainly still right up there. But it seems that there is a greater emphasis now on the Erlynne oral. And the written communication skills have kind of come back into the forefront in terms of a higher demand and higher need for that. Um, because people are not necessarily communicating as effectively. Right. Face to face communication is dropping away. Come back. Another, I'm just curious

26:44 about, um, is the gender makeup of your classes, do you have as many boys as girls now that are in the business programs? Actually I find that definitely, yes, it might various, a slight bit between different classes. Um, so I always find, honestly, like in my college classes, I have probably more

27:06 gentlemen, ladies and some of them, like my college accounting class I often find has more um, gentlemen than, than ladies. And that's kind of a bummer because being yep.

27:17 A woman in business, you know, but, um, but 15 year career, a key Corp, did you run into that proverbial glass ceiling or was that not an issue for you? Did you feel like you, I would have to say that I was really

27:32 pretty fortunate myself. I would say I've ran into some of that earlier in my career prior to actually starting with key Corp. Um, I ran into that, but when I was working for key Corp, I did not find that to be the case at all. I really found, um, the, the, the team of people that I worked with at Keycorp to be extremely, um, supportive of the females in management. As a matter of fact, that's, I, I mean I went up the curve. I, I was made a vice president by the time I was 30 at Keycorp. So I would say that I didn't really run into that. And, um, I, I know that within my group, um, and the, the, the leasing and finance company, we have a lot of, um, management people that were women business.

28:24 Yeah. Cause also what I noticed when you were describing they sit for courses that's changed.

28:29 Okay.

28:29 Back in the dark ages, it was like you were in business courses, sort of a handmaiden to the boss, you know, as opposed to being like the courses you're saying entrepreneurs and you know, really sort of leadership behinds of roles that you're instilling in these students.

28:46 You know, I, I personally think that, you know, I think women can do anything they want to do in, in business or any field that they want to go into. Um, and I would say that in our classes, we've, I think some of our classes, like I said, maybe have a few more young men, not really a hundred percent sure why, but I think that all of our, our young ladies do equally as, as well, if not better, depending upon the particular student. But, um, it's, it's great. I love, I love seeing, um, you know, the student interactions that they're fantastic. Um, you know, in my corporate law class, sometimes we get into some interesting discussions. Um, uh, you know, and sometimes they come out a little bit, male, female, you know, sometimes there's a little bit of, um, people that side on topics depending upon their gender.

29:46 But for the most part, I think just like you see out in the workplace, um, there's really a lot of interactions and communications and the like. And there isn't a lot of, I would say, discrimination or, um, isolation between folks as genders. That's good to hear. Yeah, time has going so fast, but there's so many things I didn't get to touch on, but I'm going to pull up one more because I think you're also the advisor to the mock trial team. Unfortunately, I had to give that up. I did. That was one of the things over the last few years. I wish I didn't, I wish I had more time to do that. I still mentor the Investing Club, um, the investing in your future club and that's fantastic. We have a lot of great young kids that are learning about investing and, um, money management. We're actually going to a competition in, oh gosh, it's an April, um, over at U Albany for a stock stock market competition should be great.

30:54 It should be fun. And competition. How does that work? Uh, so we, there's a lot of online simulation things that take place. We participate right now in one of the simulations through Ethica. They have a, a competition and we've participated in the Wharton competition in the past. Um, and then we do some online, uh, competitions internally with a program called are, you know, um, a tool called how the market works. Uh, I'll use some of that and some of my classes as well where it just gives the students an opportunity to simulate investing. So these, uh, the, the websites will have, um, a simulation of the stock market and then you can pick your stocks and manage your portfolio and make investment decisions just like you would in the real world. And so our, our students form together and make a team and then the team has to decide on selecting investments to put into the portfolio or to take out of the portfolio.

31:57 It's really pretty interesting. It's interesting to hear what the kids have to say about why they would invest in something or why they should do, you know, pull something out of the investments. And I bet it makes them very aware of current events, you know, with what happened in December with the stock market and kind of watching the world through the eyes of somebody who knows what's happening with investments would be, yeah, it is. It's pretty neat. They, you know, and just a curiosity behind, well, why did this happen? Why did this stock go up or stop this doco down. One of my big projects that we do on my college accounting classes, we have the students do a full blown financial analysis. And we were just talking about some companies today in class where, um, they picked a company and they have, they, they started out by just tracking those stocks and now they're kind of building on that and learning to investigate the product mix and the industry and the competitors.

32:54 And they'll go into analyzing the financial statements and the like over the rest of the course of this semester. And so they were talking about there the stock price of this one company and um, and how the stock price has changed over the last few months. And then we pull up their financial statements and we notice how leveraged the company is. And I said, okay, so why are they so leveraged? Why did they have so much debt on their balance sheet? And the kids are just starting out in their research. And they of course didn't know, but they were in tune enough to know that it was out of sync. Like it looks, it looks odd, which is great. And um, so they, so we kind of came down to, well, we'll find out the answers by the end of the semester. So that's the best. That's absolutely correct.

33:51 Do you have any closing thoughts? Anything that was really important to you that we didn't touch on sometimes miss the audience? Well, I think probably the one big thing that I would like to say is I think that, you know, I'm sitting here, um, you know, having a nice discussion with you. I would like to say I would like to thank all the people who support our, our students and our business department from a community perspective, from a parent perspective, um, you know, uh, it takes a village, I guess you could say [inaudible] and everything and people are so interconnected and so wonderful to work with. We have a great department. Our department is constantly looking at ways to try to help our students, um, succeed. And we're in the process of doing a program approval through New York State, um, which that program approval process. Once we have that program approval in place, it will help our students to have additional graduation options.

34:54 It will give them, if they choose, they can use, um, their coursework in business to help them to satisfy the requirements to either get a local diploma, um, a regents diploma or regions diploma with distinction because they can use that, what they call a CTE pathway to help them. Instead they can substitute it or use it in addition to, um, the region's requirements. And so it gives our students a lot, it gives them a lot more options and as we know, not every student fits into this little little box of how students should get to the end game. And so this gives them another set of options. And so we're really looking forward to putting that program approval in place. Um, we'll probably need some people out in the community because part of the program approval process is to have an outside look at our programs and that help us to evaluate them from the external perspective and give us input into like will these things that we're putting in place help students to become valuable members of society.

36:12 They're in terms of employment or just in general. And so we'll look for some, maybe some outside businesses who could partner with us and give us that outside Lens. Um, you know, and you know, I just really want to say thank you to people. Thank you. Thank you very much for all your support. Thank you. Support support to our school to work program. Thank you to, you know, so for supporting our internships and thank you for supporting our backpack program. I know one more company. Marsalas um, Marcel is appliances. They just recently um, uh, were willing to donate, uh, a refrigerator to us for our backpack program. So we have some place to store food. So we just found out about this, this, this past week. So would like to say thank you to them as well. You Joan. Thank you. You're very welcome. So John has just shared with me, I really interesting, don't they kind of typifies the value of this school to work program.

37:11 If you could just fill us in on. Sure. So we ha, I just received recently an email from Lisa, Sarah Villo who is head of the alumni association over at Uw University of Albany and um, Lee has one of our students from our school to work program who has been working with him, uh, and his staff, um, over at the alumni center. And the gist of it was the parents had been out to dinner and in Lousville, so not even right here in Guilderland, but they were out to dinner and one of the workers, they, the office people from the alumni house saw them and went over and greeted the student and just say hello to the student and, and shared with the parents what a wonderful job the student had been doing at the alumni house and what a pleasure it was to have the student working there.

38:09 And, you know, it just brought so much joy to them working with her. And, um, they saw how much she had learned and accomplished over the period of time that she was working with them. And the dad had written to Li to just thank him because he looked at his daughter as this coworker. Um, Jennifer was just praising his daughter and he could just look at his daughter and see the pride that was on her face and see how that moment made her feel so valued and so connected. And, um, he just, he just, you know, let Lee know that it was a, something that he didn't often get a chance to see on his daughter's face. And, um, how much he appreciated the effort that that leaves team went to to help his daughter feel that way. So, yeah. So one that'll stories yeah. Crystallizes what the program is about Nebraska. Exactly. Exactly. It's so essential from both the workplace standpoint and from the students' standpoint as well. So thank you for sharing that. You're very welcome.