Gov. Stitt wants to reimagine Career Tech. An explainer on how it works

As is often the case, the situation is both simple and complicated.

The simple answer to Stitt’s demand for more vocational training for high school students is one word: money.

Statewide, about 9,000 high school students are already on waiting lists. Nearly 200 approved programs for K-12 students aren’t funded. Meanwhile, state appropriations to CareerTech are almost 11% less than they were in 2010 and local ad valorem revenue in many places, including Tulsa County, has not kept pace with even the pre-pandemic inflation rates.

Brent Haken, the Department of Career and Technical Education’s new director, said he figures it will cost about $40 million to whittle the waiting list down to nearly zero.

That’s the short answer. The complicated answer is, well, complicated.

Unlike common and higher education, the state’s 29 CareerTech centers are funded mostly through local property tax millages. Those millages were approved by the districts’ voters, primarily in the 1960s and early 1970s.

A mill is 0.1% or $1 on every $1,000 of assessed value.

A 1968 state constitutional amendment limits CareerTech millages at a total of 15, with a maximum of 5 set aside for a building fund. In addition, CareerTech districts, like K-12 districts, may issue bonds for capital improvements. Unlike K-12 districts they seldom do.

That’s for practical as well as political reasons.

As a practical matter, most building millages generate enough revenue to pay cash for capital improvements. This saves taxpayers lending costs, including interest, but results in some districts carrying large fund balances that cause bean counters to raise alarms from time to time.

Thus, about every 10 years, someone announces that CareerTech has too much money, or is spending too much of it on buildings.

From a local politics standpoint, CareerTech officials say they don’t like to compete with K-12 districts, community colleges, library systems and other local services that rely on bond issues. Several districts, including Tulsa Tech, do not even collect the 15-mill maximum.

Haken says funding of CareerTech varies widely, according to the millages approved by voters and local tax bases.

“Many of them, in rural areas where we have huge wait lists trying to get into those systems, don’t have the building funds that Tulsa might have or (an Oklahoma City) metro area because of the ad valorem base. About five of them receive very minimal (state funding), less than 5% of their budget.”

State and local CareerTech officials say the nature of technical education is more labor and capital intensive than a traditional high school setting. The one- and two-year career-focused programs for juniors and seniors are typically taught in half-day blocks and often involve hands-on use of expensive equipment.

“Instead of 25 students in an algebra class with one teacher, and you have six or seven of those classes a day, you can only serve 20, maybe less, per instructor during a three-hour (CareerTech) period,” said Tulsa Technology Center Superintendent Steve Tiger.

“Plus there are work stations. There are major safety issues. There is equipment that has to be shared. Those things inherent to what we do are going to cause you to serve less students than you would for an English class.”

Probably the biggest example of that, literally, is at Tulsa Tech’s Riverside Campus, where a donated Boeing 727 for the aircraft maintenance programs is housed.

“When you look at the difference in our classrooms and buildings, they’re high-level technical class space and shop space that is dedicated to the training,” said Tulsa Tech Chief Communications and Economic Development Officer Tony Heaberlin.

CareerTech received $137.6 million in state appropriations this year — about 3% of all state education appropriations. Although not required by law to do so, the department allocates that money by district need, not enrollment.

Thus, Tulsa Technology Center, the state’s largest and oldest CareerTech district, got just 6% of its 2022 operating revenue from the state, and almost all of that was statutorily dedicated to faculty benefits. It also receives some state economic development money for company-specific employee training programs.

Tulsa Tech is about twice the size of the next-largest district and has one in five CareerTech students statewide, but says it received about $200,000 for general operations from the state this year.

By comparison, its 10 general revenue mills reaped almost $62 million in ad valorem taxes. The district also gets 3 mills for its building fund.

In his speech, Stitt suggested CareerTech could perhaps shift construction spending to expand instructional capacity, but it isn’t that easy. Building fund millages can only be used for capital improvements.

The distribution of millages can be changed, but under most scenarios would require a statewide vote on a constitutional amendment.

So what about starting CareerTech in the ninth grade? Stitt isn’t the first or only person to raise that question.

Turns out, CareerTech offers some in-classroom instruction as early as fifth grade. It is also responsible for traditional vocational programs such as agriculture and family and consumer sciences, aka home economics. But one of the system’s largest growth areas has been one- and two-hour foundational courses on middle and high school campuses. But those programs are mostly funded through state appropriations.

“We haven’t seen an increase in state funding, which is how we incentivize those programs, in about 10 years,” said Haken. “We can’t fund those programs fast enough so (individual K-12 districts) are having to go and do it on their own.”

Tulsa Tech says it has been able to use its building fund to renovate space in 12 Tulsa County schools where it is offering such courses. Tiger said about 1,500 students are enrolled.

While Tiger is enthusiastic about these foundational courses, he is leery of bringing freshmen and sophomores into the half-day programs. And, in any event, there just isn’t room for them in most programs.

Tulsa Tech is at about 93% capacity overall, he said, but has about 1,500 people on waiting lists for high-demand programs — which brings up another difference between CareerTech and K-12 public schools, or even public colleges and universities, for that matter.

To a large extent, CareerTech’s enrollments are determined by capacity rather than demand. Administrators can’t just cram a few more chairs into a classroom or add a section. Each fulltime program has a set number of slots that can’t be easily exceeded. For fiscal year 2022, CareerTech enrollments totaled 446,940.

Thus, admission is to some extent competitive. Each applicant is ranked according to an assessment and accepted accordingly.

Haken said he’s using Stitt’s speech as “a platform to tell everyone what CareerTech does.” He’s spoken to several groups of legislators, he said, and found most of them did not understand the system.

“I’m also now getting an opportunity to speak to the governor himself,” Haken said.

“I am right in line with what the governor is saying. We need to have more kids in CareerTech.”