New Orleans center helps high schoolers land jobs — and launch careers

The New Orleans Career Center has one main goal: to connect local industries with highly trained young people to fill their open jobs.

Jake Gleghorn, the center’s head of strategy, says employers have told him, “This is amazing. I never knew an 18-year-old could do this. I never knew a young person could do this.”

Gleghorn taught in New Orleans schools for a decade and noticed a gap.

“I think that the connection with work, the connection with jobs and the connection to the larger community was a place that we had to grow,” he says.

Claire Jecklin, another New Orleans educator, helped found the center in 2017 with the same idea, and Gleghorn joined the team a few years later.

In New Orleans’ decentralized, almost all-charter system, the independent nonprofit provides career and technical education to high schoolers and adults across the city.

The center brings students from different schools together to train in five industries: health care, construction, engineering, digital media, and culinary.

This year, it doubled its enrollment to 600 students from two dozen schools and can accommodate up to 1,200.

The state-of-the-art facility in the Tremé neighborhood is itself a teaching tool. The guts of the building are exposed, so students learning building trades can work on water pipes, wires and more.

Landon Alexander started a two-year program at the center in his senior year. He says he was excited to get out of the classroom and “build stuff.”

He knew early on he didn’t want to go to college because of student debt.

“That’s really the main reason why I didn’t want to go,” he says. “‘Cause I ain’t wanna be paying off student debt my whole life.”

Alexander wanted to pick up a trade but had no idea which one.

When he arrived at the center, he’d never held a tool. In his first year, he tried a bunch before picking a specialty. Now, he’s set to graduate with a certificate in welding, a job where he’s likely to make more than $20 an hour.

Upstairs at the center, there’s a commercial kitchen and an entire medical wing. Classrooms include mock exam rooms with lifelike mannequins. Students use them to practice things like drawing blood and inserting catheters.

Jereneta Davenport is a certified nurse who leads the center’s pre-nursing program. That’s one of the things that makes the center unique. Professionals teach all of the programs.

Davenport is a New Orleans native and got her start in nursing in high school through a similar job training program.

She’s supported herself financially since she was 15 years old. “I think my personal experiences are relatable to the trainees,” she says since her students are often also in survival mode.

Her goal is to get them to think long-term. One of the first questions she asks them is, “What’s a job versus a career?”

“When you have a career, you can work almost anywhere,” she says.

Whereas a job, “If you work at McDonald’s, you work at McDonald’s. If you work at Walmart, you can work at Walmart. Yes, there’s cashiers everywhere, but there’s not very much opportunity for growth.”

Amari Jones is a senior at L.B. Landry High School on the West Bank.

She spends half of every school day at the center. She’s wearing scrubs and a sparkly blue clip on her lanyard that says “nurse in progress.”

Jones came to the center last year to become a medical assistant and got selected to become more highly trained and earn a nursing credential. She says balancing the program with her other classes and a job at Cane’s has been hard but worth it.

“I’m not gonna stop there,” she says. “That’s not my end goal.”

She now wants to become a travel nurse, maybe even a nurse practitioner.

Jones says her classmates at the career center have their own dreams. They’re motivated and optimistic, and they support one another.

“The kids, they’re out here pushing it,” she says.

There’s a student she especially admires. “I tell him every day you’re gonna do big things. Like I see you. Your future is bright.”

She knows her future is bright, too.