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Members,
I hope you enjoyed our presentation on education at last week’s member breakfast meeting. We are looking forward to working with Dr. Brimm to fine tune our new job-shadowing program to ultimately produce a viable educational resource to the schools and youth centers of our community!
To quickly review for those that may not have been in attendance, we are working to develop a job-shadowing program through our Chamber that will target middle school to high school students in our community and abroad. Dr. Valerie Brimm, the Director of the Office of Strategic Partnerships for Pinellas County Schools, spoke to us at our monthly breakfast meeting about the benefits of a job shadowing program and how we can work specifically with Pinellas County Schools. My education committee will be working continuously with Dr. Brimm to lay out the plans and build the framework upon which this program can grow and perhaps become more than a job shadowing program in the future.
As we continue the development of our program, we need to solicit the key part of our job-shadowing program – business participation. Particularly, we are looking for business owners that are willing to host a student for a day at no cost to them. Once we have compiled a list of businesses that are willing to participate, we will offer what I hope will be a wide range of opportunities from which the students can choose; thus, the student that you host will be eager to learn the inner-workings of your business and your profession. Not only would you be allowing a student to learn more about a potential profession and motivate them to work towards the future, but also you would personally have the opportunity to influence the life of a student, the future of our community, our county, our state, our nation and our world as a whole. If you are able, please participate in this program to make our Chamber a more useful resource to all aspects of our community and ultimately, a Chamber that will be even more distinguished among the rest.
We are looking to begin offering our program in January at the start of the second semester. Students would only be present at your businesses in the afternoon, after school in most cases, for a few hours. As far as how frequent we would run the program, we are unsure. It would be nice to do it once a month, but it may be more practical to do it once per quarter.
Please feel free to contact me with any ideas, questions or feedback regarding this program. I am looking forward to hearing from you. You can contact me through my personal e-mail: rcbutler90@gmail.com or by phone at (727) 373-8507.
Thank you,
Ricky Butler
Education Committee, Chairman
Pinellas Park/Gateway Chamber of Commerce
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