Adobe Mountain School in Phoenix, Ariz., is not your average high school. Rather than a typical public school district, it is operated by the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections. The students, ages 14-18, are embarking on reentry programs, and this fully secure school gives them a place to do that.
Adobe Mountain School provides mental health services, high school classes, vocational and career readiness programs, life-skill lessons and special education. The school caters to the needs of each student, ensuring expectations and rehabilitation services match the student’s current academic and social level. The ultimate goal is to see students earn their high school diploma. The facility uses two NRF Foundation RISE Up credentials within its career readiness program: Retail Industry Fundamentals and Supply Chain, Inventory and Logistics.
Regina Weiler, strategic operations manager at the Arizona Department of Economic Security, works with the ADJC to ensure that Adobe Mountain School provides proper reentry services to its students. She integrated the NRF Foundation’s credentials into the program in 2019. Here are some ways RISE Up has influenced the curriculum since.
Why RISE Up?
Weiler specifically mentions the self-paced, individualized nature of the courses as helpful for the needs of Adobe Mountain School. “They access it through tablets online,” she says. “The individualized pace the youth are able to do on the tablets themselves takes that pressure off of that classroom learning environment.”
Students at Adobe Mountain School are at different education levels; some have language barriers that require students to need more time or additional accommodations. That makes it difficult to implement a single curriculum for a group of students.
“When you’re dealing with the different stages, the different levels of education, sometimes secondary language issues, having them be able to work at their own pace in the classroom … alongside other individuals in the classroom,” Weiler says, “it removes some of the stigma, some of the barriers that the individual may be experiencing.”
Skills between the lines
Many skills within the RISE Up credential programs prove useful to Adobe Mountain School students. They learn retail industry specifics, but the videos integrated into the courses allow students to see these skills in action, such as “how you approach [customers], your body language, how to [conduct] yourself,” Weiler says.
She says they use “play scenarios” where a student may be an employee or a customer, and that seeing these “soft skills come to life in the students is massively rewarding.”
In addition to the skills learned through the course itself, RISE Up may be students’ first experience with structured schooling. With the “quick wins” in the program, Weiler says, there is a “light of hope on their faces after passing just the first module … and then getting that first success on the exam, and then finally holding their certificate.”
Weiler describes the course as “a confidence builder. It shows them that they can accomplish things. Not only does it teach them skills needed to participate in structured schooling, but it shows them that they can do it.”
The impact
Weiler says there’s a wall at Adobe Mountain School where students put different certificates and credentials they earned in their time there. “A lot of these students have never had success in high school,” Weiler says. Students can prove their capability to employers with these credentials. More importantly, they can prove it to themselves.
“It may be that they’ve been out a significant amount of time, and so this builds their confidence before they look for work, while they’re looking for work, and also joining training programs,” Weiler says. “To me, that’s as about as rewarding as it gets.”
RISE Up is the NRF Foundation training and credentialing program that provides foundational employability skills to help people land jobs and get promoted in retail and beyond.
Our curriculum and exams are industry-recognized and were developed in collaboration with more than 20 retailers, including Walmart, Macy’s, The Home Depot, Burlington Stores, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Nordstrom. And we’re proud to partner with more than 3,000 training partners across the country.
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