Allatoona CTAE Advisory Meeting

Today was my first CTAE Advisory committee meeting at Meghan's high school. CTAE stands for 'Career, Technical and Agricultural' (no idea where the 'E' comes from). Basically it is the department for everything 'not core' in High School.

I was asked to join by the Business & computer teacher, who I've spoken with a few times and offered to help. The other members include bankers, real estate, small business owners, construction managers and a couple of parents.

All I have to say is 'Wow'. The classrooms and subjects offered by this department are incredible. Since it covers a lot of topics, we had a tour of each area. How about an ex-Weather Channel video desk/backdrop with a state of the art Video system? Or a state of the art 3-D model rendering machine for the drafting group? Or a commercial kitchen for Culinary Arts that makes most restaurants look like a BBQ Grill? Or access to the entire Adobe authoring suite for HTML, Flash and animation creation?

I also was able to see a couple of the classroom that Meghan takes her classes in and can now understand some of the things she told me about.

These are definitely not the schools we went to.

Since this was the first meeting we didn't discuss much about directions for the department, feedback on course criteria etc. but that will come in our next meeting.