Since the 2016-17 school year, Cloverdale Community Schools has helped prepare high school students for the future under the Jobs for America's Graduates (JAG) program.
"The program is geared towards building workplace readiness in students, which includes specific instruction in job attainment and maintenance, leadership and personal development, and academic growth. The program has a particularly proclivity for assisting students through being grounded by the "JAG Advantage" which is instruction attentive to trauma informed care, steeped in employer engagement, and grounded in project based learning," Cloverdale JAG specialist Karl Turk told The Putnam County Post.
Now, the Clovers will be preparing younger students, as the school board recently approved the adoption of a JAG program at Cloverdale Middle School. Turk said up until this academic year, JAG Indiana focused solely on junior and senior classes in high schools. However, all that changed when Governor Holcomb announced a decision to expand JAG Indiana to 250 programs by 2025. As a result, school districts were given the opportunity to add a middle school option.
"We feel that it is vital and imperative for our community to have a JAG program because the middle school years are such an impressionable and critical time in a person's development," Turk said.
Turk said a middle school JAG program will specifically address many of the specific personal development challenges that young teenagers experience daily.
"It will install further value in the attainment of education and workplace readiness in the adolescent, and will inspire forward and visionary thinking in an age group that is often consumed with strictly the present and often oblivious to consequences, planning, and the type of future they may want to have," Turk said.
