EDITORIAL: High-paying jobs sit open

The Clark County School District has made small strides in recent years when it comes to exposing more students to classes that prepare them for careers in the trades. The district’s Career and Technical Education Program is one such example.

But more must be done as such training becomes vital to providing an alternative pathway for those not looking to acquire a four-year college degree. It’s also important to the nation’s long-term economic health, as employers struggle to fill openings for skilled trade positions that pay healthy wages.

“These are family-sustaining careers,” one energy company executive told The Wall Street Journal last week.

Some employers, the paper reported, have begun recruiting high school students before they even graduate. In Philadelphia, the Journal found, juniors at a Catholic high school that offers welding classes say they’ve been offered $70,000 jobs upon receiving their diploma.

“Efforts to recruit high-schoolers into professions such as plumbing, electrical work and welding have helped spur a revitalization of shop classes in many districts,” according to the Journal. In California, a mechanical contractor now sponsors a nonprofit summer program intended to expose students to the trades and serve as a pipeline for employers. Similar programs have sprung up across the country.

“You’ve got to stop thinking someone else is going to solve your problem,” the executive director of one such effort explained.

There is dignity in work — and success doesn’t require that a student go six figures into debt to attend a prestigious college or university. There are different roads to fulfillment and financial security, although too many high schools in recent years have focused primarily on higher education as the preferable way forward. The result has been a dearth of qualified candidates to fill well-paying jobs in the trades and an increase in able-bodied adults sitting on the couch at home.

“There are able-bodied men in their working ages not only not working, but not looking,” Mike Rowe, host of “Dirty Jobs” told Fox News this week. “That, to me, is one of the greatest alarm bells going on in the country. We’ve never seen that before, not in peacetime anyway.”

A more concerted focus in high school on the advantages of learning a trade could help reverse that trend.

In Henderson, the Gibson McGath Foundation says it will have trade-related shop programs in many of the city’s private schools by next year and has its sights set on the Clark County School District. “The foundation has been a dream of my wife and I for over a decade,” foundation President Jeffrey Gibson told Channel 8 news in January. “We really wanted to bring the trades into the schools.”

It’s an offer that district officials shouldn’t refuse.