After the COVID pandemic halted the end of eighth grade and made much of freshman year a remote experience, Jacob Roberts of Auxier, on the northern border of Floyd County, wanted to make the most of the rest of high school. He found his match with the opening of the Floyd County School of Innovation his sophomore year. By graduation in May 2024, felt like he hit a jackpot.
Work by Floyd County school leaders in the years before and after the pandemic have overhauled options and approaches for educators and students. A new examination of local workforce needs, closer attention to student interests, and a focus on building better pathways to new credits, credentials, and learning experiences have opened an array of new opportunities in the 5,200-student district in eastern Kentucky.
“We realized that we needed to capitalize on what we have and bridge the gaps where we wanted to make better connections,” said Denise Isaac, chief of high school and career-technical education for the district.
The shifts caused the district to look more closely at workforce development data, expand community contacts in academic fields and economic development, and boost partnerships with postsecondary institutions. She said it is also showing stronger results on measures like graduation rates, postsecondary transition readiness, and meeting ACT benchmarks.
In recent years, Floyd has become a leading partner in the Eastern Kentucky Student Success Pipeline initiative designed to place more students in internships and open additional career pathways for students in the region. The district’s Graduate Profile, also known as a “profile of a learner,” adopted in 2023, expects all students to have experiences that will help them develop as empowered learners, innovative designers, global collaborators, computational thinkers, digital citizens, creative communicators, and knowledge constructors.
Within the county, school officials have worked with local individuals to build support for options ranging from new high school physics offerings to links with agriculture programs. New interest inventories from sixth graders and discussions with older students have prompted urgency to develop new options like a health pathway training future emergency medical technicians or certifications that are advantageous first steps for software designers.
“We want to do everything we can do, and we want to hold students hands as much as possible, recognizing there may not be other ways outside of school to assist students in making these steps,” Isaac said.
The Floyd County School of Innovation has been a major new step. The program, operated in concert with the district’s high schools, offers pathways that connect to postsecondary tracks as well as local workforce needs that were not available in the district’s traditional vocational programs.
Law enforcement, heavy equipment operation, computer science, and healthcare are among the areas where students can earn certifications and college-level credits while also learning about job opportunities in the local area. The school has worked to meet demand, enrolling 80 students, then 150, then 230 in its first three years.
Also growing, the Floyd County Early College Academy is a collaboration with Big Sandy Community and Technical College where students earn high school and college credit, allowing teens to progress toward an associate’s degree by the time they finish high school. The school, with 24 full-time juniors and seniors involved last year, maps how students can begin in 8th grade earning credits that will lead to a two-year arts or science college degree by the end of 12th grade with costs for tuition, books, and meals fully covered.
Jacob Roberts began his time at the School of Innovation interested in law enforcement, but eventually took an interest in the healthcare courses taught in an adjoining classroom. He moved seamlessly from learning about crash reconstructions reconstituting medications, from powder to liquid or tablet to cream. “I found out that my brain is more geared for science,” he said. The program allowed him to become a certified pharmacy technician by his senior year and be accepted to the University of Pikeville, where he intends to attend pharmacy school.
“During online school in 2020, I was thinking, ‘What am I going to end up doing with my life? and I didn’t know at all,” he recalls. “I think that everyone who comes here, even if they don’t know what they want to do, feels like they’re going to find their spot.”
Amy Newsome, a former middle school and high school science teacher, now serves as one of two digital learning coaches for the district. The position, created to help teachers and students navigate virtual learning challenges during COVID, has grown into a support position for more engaging and technology-focused learning experiences, still supporting both teachers and students.
“I’m teaching all of our eighth graders about different types of engineers, the engineering design process, and working to engineering standards,” she said. “It’s all hands-on. When we were growing up, we didn’t know all of the opportunities available to us. If you were a girl, you could maybe be a teacher or nurse. We are now offering students support to open all kinds of doors and to know what’s available.”
