This is National Apprenticeship Week, an effort by the U.S. Department of Labor to highlight programs in schools offering “earn-to-learn” opportunities.

Pella High School Principal Eric Nelson tells KRLS News they’ve had success with their new apprenticeship in welding, which was started last year and developed with Vermeer and other area manufacturers, and have now expanded to include culinary arts, nursing, and technical engineering.

“It’s been an exciting venture for our students and business partners,” he says. “Right now in place, we have four specific registered apprenticeships, and we also are aligning it with–in that apprenticeship program, the ability to earn their Des Moines Area Community College associate of general studies degree.”

Director of K-12 Education Lowell Ernst says it’s expanding opportunity to students who otherwise might be left behind by more traditional means of post-secondary education.

“It’s definitely a pathway that fits certain students,” he says. “I think that niche–that idea that ‘I want a job with a future and career, that doesn’t necessarily take me through that pathway that we used to think was the only way to et there,’ I think that’s exciting to them.”

Hear more about the apprenticeship program at Pella High School and how it’s serving as a model for other districts in Iowa on today’s Let’s Talk Pella.