Students present in the CAPS Accelerator, while the program’s manager Scott Kreshel (far left) and their classmates listen in.
The future of education may be right here in Kansas City, tucked away in a modern building in Overland Park, Kan., bustling with teenagers.
The Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS), part of the Blue Valley school district, takes an entrepreneurial, innovative approach to education that aims to provide more than 900 junior and senior high school students with hands-on, real world experience.
Thanks to our sponsor
“We don’t really act like a school,” CAPS director Chad Ralston said.
The facility doesn’t look like a school either. From the artwork and motivational quotes on the walls, to the modern, collaborative spaces, to “classmates,” such as a working flight simulator, mock hospital patients, basketball-tossing robots and 3D printers, just about everything about CAPS is unique. There is a corporate boardroom, a state-of-the-art science lab, a high-tech athletic training center, a shop room that puts your typical high school shop class to shame, and open presentation spaces to share it all.
“Problem-based learning”
Founded in 2009, CAPS serves the Blue Valley school district, including parochial and homeschool students. It offers courses to students in four areas, or “strands”: bioscience, business, engineering and human services. In each, students are immersed in a profession-based learning approach.
“We try to put kids into an environment here where they do problem-based learning,” Ralston said. “We don’t want kids doing anything here that they would not do in their professional workplace.”
Of the seven daily classes a typical Blue Valley high school student would attend, as many as three can be taken up with CAPS courses. Students are required to apply to the program, and work with CAPS administrators and their school counselors to choose the strand that’s best for them.
CAPS doesn’t exclude students, Ralston said, as long as they are on time to graduate. Approximately one-fifth of all eligible Blue Valley students participate. He stressed that the program consists of 4.0 GPA students alongside 2.0 GPA students. Through the center’s partnerships with several local colleges, students are often able to apply their coursework with CAPS into college credit.
CAPS Innovate
The emphasis on entrepreneurialism is present throughout CAPS. They recently added a new course, Innovate, that is “specifically designed for entrepreneurial-minded students seeking high-tech resources and multi-talented teams to ‘Innovate’ and ‘Accelerate’ their ideas.” The course is located in CAPS’ new Accelerator, and focuses on teamwork to develop new products and services, while benefiting from resources from the Kauffman FastTrac TechVenture program, and mentors from companies such as Google and Apple. In hackathon style, the course concludes with a full pitch to an investor panel.
Educators and funding
The educators who teach at CAPS aren’t your typical high school teachers. Some have come over from a high school setting, Ralston said, but many come from some of the professions they hope their students pursue: hospital physicians, corporate executives and engineers. Seasoned teachers or not, all of the CAPS educators have had at least a foot in the industry within which they teach at CAPS.
CAPS is funded locally, just like other schools in the Blue Valley district, but the Center receives regular benefits from their personal relationships with local businesses. “They provide us with funding, materials, space at their own facilities and mentors,” Ralston said. “It’s a win-win for them because they are looking for future talent.”
Their list of business partners is extensive, including Kansas City area companies H&R Block, Sprint, Garmin, Cerner, Hallmark, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Polsinelli Shugart and Sporting Kansas City.
“The future of education”
A quote on the back of a CAPS informational brochure might sum it up best: “These students work on projects for major corporations, presenting proposals that are evaluated by industry leaders,” said Daniel J. Capra, a global sales executive for Hewlett Packard. “This program will shape their college and career aspirations more than anything else they have experienced to this point. This is the future of education.”
Credits: Photos by Annie Sorensen.
