“Students are hungry for other ways to learn,” said Donneta Oremus, CTE coordinator for the Marysville School District.

She was referring to students at the Arts and Tech High School on the Tulalip campus. Many take Career and Technical Education classes, and 33 seniors are part of a district pilot program called JAG, for Jobs for America’s Graduates. All of the programs there are an effort to keep students from dropping out.

Jesse Petitte, Addison Maldanado, Tyler Griffith and Nathan Flynn said they may have quit school if not for Arts and Tech.

Nathan, 17, went there for its robotics program. Through JAG he also was introduced to the military and already has enlisted in the National Guard. He starts right after graduation. He plans to get back into robotics, going to college on the GI Bill when his enlistment is over.

Tyler, 17, also went to the school for robotics, but is changing his emphasis to psychology because he wants to be a therapist. “Since a young age I wanted to help people,” he said. He plans to attend Everett Community College and then the Brigham Young campus in Idaho.

Addison, 18, went to a big middle school, Cedarcrest, and wanted to go to a small high school. While she was good at science and math, she didn’t really like it. Now she wants to be a juvenile probation officer. “I’m super people-oriented,” she said, adding she works full-time at a coffee stand. It was there working graveyard that she talked to Tulalip and Marysville police about law enforcement. “They told me to get a job as a corrections officer right after graduation to get my foot in the door,” she said. She added she loves kids and once worked at Children’s Place. “I want to make a difference,” she said. “They need guidance.” Through JAG, she toured Skagit Valley Community College and decided to go there because its law enforcement program was better.

Jesse, 18, moved back to the area from Kansas when he started high school. He decided on Arts and Tech because he thought it would be easy. “I wanted to play with stuff and mess around in class,” he said. But it wasn’t easy, and he became interested in journalism and yearbook. He’s been involved in the school paper in photography, writing and design. He plans to get his associate’s degree at a technical college and get a job in computer networking and servers.

All four said they are glad they picked Arts and Tech, but for different reasons. Nathan said he learned organization, while Tyler said lectures from teachers helped him mature. Addison said she likes how teachers connect information to the real world, while Jesse said he likes how teachers made him find out things for himself through research. Nathan said smaller class sizes help, while Tyler said there are fewer opportunities in larger schools. Addison said she likes having the same teachers for four years because, “They get to know us at a different level.”

The mix of ninth through 12th graders in classes also helps the younger ones mature faster, she added.

Jesse said students want to learn there because they are learning “what they want to do.”

Where at bigger schools you have to learn “what’s taught,” Tyler said.

“What the standards are,” Nathan added, saying at Arts and Tech it is more flexible.

Jesse said students there can learn video design, and in journalism he can get out into the community and do interviews.

Addison said the teachers also are interested in feedback from students. “They want to know what we like so we stay interested,” she said, adding the school is more project-oriented than most.

“We do presentations on almost everything we do,” Tyler said, adding he might have dropped out but at the small school they are “like family. You don’t drop out on your family.”

Addison said the teachers helped keep her in school, which wasn’t a priority for her early there. “The teachers get it into your head that it’s important,” she said.

“They motivate you,” Jesse added.

As for being pioneers of the JAG program, all four said it has helped in their knowledge about jobs.

“I had no resume before JAG,” Jesse said, while Tyler added he just got his first job at the Tulalip McDonald’s.

Addison said she never would have applied for a scholarship without JAG. “There are so many kids smarter than me,” she said. “But there’s a lot of money out there.”

Nathan said he wouldn’t have joined the guard without JAG, and Jesse said he wouldn’t have known about other technical colleges if not for the field trips they’ve gone on.

“There’s bigger opportunities at other places,” Addison said.

MSD career counselor David Carpenter is the JAG manager at Arts and Tech. He sees his job as providing “next steps. Reel them in and help them focus. Get them in the workforce.”

Carpenter said the JAG classes “are a completely different animal” for the students but the “light has gone off for more than half” of them. For the others, he hopes peer work this semester will help. “Student to student is huge,” he said.

Along with resume writing, he has done mock interviews with students and taken them to visit college campuses and job shadows. He makes sure they are on track to graduate, and helps them apply for jobs and scholarships. They also learn leadership, team building and have guest speakers.

“It’s fun so see them come out of their shells,” he said. “I believe if we give them the stage to perform on, and the tools they need, they want to learn.”

Oremus added, “It’s the nuts and bolts they don’t get elsewhere.”

Oremus is the one who brought JAG to the district. She had worked with it previously in Mount Vernon and Anacortes.

“We had students requesting to participate in the program, and I don’t even think they realized they were actually doing so much work,” she said. “That’s the magic of it when it works well, to accept the students where they are, and lead them to where they need to be’ but all the time, they are the one’s doing the heavily lifting toward their future success.”

Oremus applied for and received a $20,000 start-up grant from OSPI after she took the job this year at MSD. They have been doing so well they recently received another $5,300.

JAG gives students “the extra support needed to get them through school, stay engaged in learning, and moving toward becoming graduates and contributing members of society,” Oremus said.

She hopes to expand the program to other sites in the district in coming years, as it is connected to a reduction in dropout rates. Nationally, the program has been around for 34 years, helping almost one million at-risk students in 31 states. They have an 83 percent graduation rate at a cost of $580 a student.

“It is a successful model to get kids employment,” Oremus said.