We are proud to present this report which celebrates our work to keep kids connected, engaged and hopeful for the future in a school year that ended amidst a fog of uncertainty in every aspect of our lives –- including our work, our schools, our personal relationships and our community.

Despite the many challenges of 2020, we remained committed to our mission and values through the innovation of education-to-career opportunities in support of local students:

• Lifting up student voices! Beginning Fall 2019, we expanded our partnership with YouthTruth Student Survey, which illustrated how our county’s students experience higher levels of stress and anxiety about their futures, exacerbated by the impacts of distance learning and the catastrophic fires over the past several years. The results validate the crucial need for the kind of engagement, hands-on learning and career exploration that career technical education provides.
• Demonstrating our values by getting behind: Black Lives Matter. In addition to publicly acknowledging Black Lives Matter, we began our own journey to understand and address systemic racism, seeking meaningful change in both ourselves and our organization by engaging in honest conversations about race and unconscious bias.
• Investing quickly and wisely. In a quick response to support what we heard was most needed by CTE teachers, we launched a distance learning grant program to get tools, supplies, and materials in the hands of students in maker, engineering and construction courses.

And while we are proud to be sharing the accomplishments of CTE Foundation through this report, these accomplishments were not possible without the dedication and resiliency of our educators. We are awed by the empathy, creativity and dedication of the teachers who persevered through so much that was unknown, unpredictable and uncertain.

Despite the shadow that the COVID-19 pandemic cast over the learning landscape in spring 2020, it’s because of the creativity of our educators and the initiative and flexibility of many of our students that we can report positive outcomes. Our success is directly related to their commitment to hands-on learning and their drive to continue pursuing their curiosity. 

We cannot help but be extremely proud of the innovation and resilience of CTE Foundation staff to meet the needs of students and teachers through a crisis that we never could have predicted. And we are most grateful to our donors, board members and community partners who have cheered us along the way.

Sincerely,

Kathy Goodacre, CEO & Jeremy Olsan, Chair