Elliot Washor's TGIF 03.13.2026

Are you with me now? A. J. Ryder 

 Crishell with support from Charlie put on a really great conference in Charleston. South Carolina. This time we were at a school – The Cooper River Center for Advanced Studies. Although the conference was specifically about Harbor freight Fellows and the skilled trades, we got a glimpse of other pathways that included cybersecurity, logistics, media, health sciences, megatronics and more. It was great talking with the students, seeing their actual work and how they described it. Also, it was eye-opening to see how many on the staff came from industry after they retired. These teachers had connections to the world beyond the school that allowed students to gain paid internships and work both during and after high school but few were happening during the school day.

Through it all our Harbor Freight Fellows led the way showing how to do things differently and intentionally connecting to industry outside of school. Here they are on. a panel with their mentors from McCleod Health. Two examples of this were the Industrial Maintenance program developed by Crishell and Charlie at McCleod and a partnership with an HVAC company called Cullum. The photo above is a photo of the Harbor Freight Fellows on panel at the conference with their mentors. The photo below was taken during our visit to Cullum.

The day before the conference we had a chance to spend the day at Cullum and see how our Harbor Freight Fellows were doing as they were embraced by this company not just for internships but for who they are as people. This is a company that doesn’t let go of its personnel. It keeps them employed in good times and bad. Of course this makes for a different type of culture and a place where you want to work. McCleod Hospital is similar. These are places where the work is steady. As a testament to the success of the Industrial Maintenance program another larger hospital/healthcare center wants to start not only a Harbor Freight Fellows program but a Lifestyle Medicine – BPLving Fellows program. Here the design is the same, only the type of work differs. When you think of airports, hospitals, universities and other large places that have their own infrastructures, they are prime sites for these types of internships.

 Another high point for me was the announcement of our first Big Picture school in South Carolina made by Katayah Clark the principal. The Palmetto Pathways Academy will open this September.

 Over the week a couple of meetings converged around translating facilities from innovative practice and why it rarely happens. Most don’t know it but this was my dissertation topic. It was done as we were designing and building The Met and to this day, when most dissertations sit on a shelf and never get referenced or used, this dissertation is used all over the world. Being that our conference was at the Cooper River Center for Advanced Studies - a brand-new building loaded with the latest technology and equipment, I was really curious about the school design and whether any innovation in practice was reflected in the building. To start off, it is a school that students attend for a couple of half days during the week. This makes for a different type of school culture. How school culture is developed is so important to the success here. Will it operate more like a new version of an old vocational school or will students be known well and have ‘go to’ people both in and outside of the school who know them and one another? It sounds so easy to do and yet most educators are still stuck in an old paradigm even with all of this new equipment in a new facility. Yes, the place is loaded with new technologies and hands on equipment and yes, the light coming into the building is great and yes, the furniture is comfortable but the teaching practices remain pretty much the same curriculum of following a script to get a credential. The good news is that there’s lots of work to be done and Harbor Freight Fellows is making everyone think differently,

Then later on in the week, Gordon Karau, Rafael Sampaio Rocha, Kanoa Chung and Nathan Teixeira from Noho, the architects designing Namahana School and I had a call about the Namahan facility. We had a great chat about how the facilities design is so important for reasons even beyond this community. Namahana is a rural school that is being built in the center of Kilauea town that pushes back on the trend of school consolidation. This movement closed thousands of small rural schools all over the US to the detriment of so many communities where these community schools were part of the life blood and vibrancy of their hometown. Namahana is a beacon for a community school movement where small rural schools come back even better than before.

Next week, I’ll be in Anaheim with Anthonette, Andrea and staff from New Village Girls Academy and Met Sacramento for a meeting of the California Secondary School Redesign work. Yesterday, this group of networks in CSSR just finished up a Zoom in preparation for our first face to face meeting.  At this time, we will present both the IBPLC and our work on Internships.

Be Well!