Chamber Notes Archives

July 12, 2005

Putting the "B" back in BASICS

As I write this column, I’m seated in the second row of the balcony at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. A Creative Writing professor in college once told me that it’s sometimes better to vary the location of where you write to gain a fresher perspective.

I may have taken that advice to an extreme.

Actually I’m in Nashville to attend the 13th Annual Model Schools Conference, sponsored by an organization known as the International Center for Leadership in Education. This is the fourth year I’ve attended the conference as a representative of our BASICS program.

Chamber members can take some consolation in knowing that not one penny of their dues investment is paying for me to be in Nashville. Only some consolation, since it's your tax dollars that sent me here, through a federal grant from the Department of Labor.

BASICS, for those of you who don't know, is an acronym for Business And Schools Investing in Cooperative Solutions. It is a program that The Chamber started about a decade ago to create a more engaging partnership between the local business and education communities.

For the most part, BASICS have accomplished most of what it set-out to do, albeit in a roundabout way. Instead of creating one partnership, it has actually created two. There is a partnership between business and The Chamber and a partnership between education and The Chamber. The Chamber, consequently, has become more of an intermediary than a conduit. Not at all the original intention, yet not unworkable either.

An examination of business-education relationships throughout the country would reveal that most fall into either one of two categories: adversarial or non-existent. Business has had little time for education because it believes that it moves at a slow pace and doesn't have an adequate understanding of the needs of the workplace. Education counters with claims that educational programming aimed at workforce development is time-consuming and expensive and that too often business wants something for nothing.

BASICS has helped to smooth the waters and The Chamber, by luck or design, has been successful in making both sides look for common ground without regard as to which should steer the boat.

As a business organization, we would like to believe that we've already got business on-board. So we've worked harder to cement the relationship with education and found that school districts in Blair County readily support and appreciate our efforts. We routinely petition school administrators for access to teachers and guidance counselors as we develop things like career curricula and we've never once been denied.

As sometimes happens though, enthusiasm for one side of a partnership can tilt the process out of balance. The BASICS steering committee is a perfect example. Beginning as a twenty-member group with equal representation, it has somehow evolved into a twenty-four member group, nineteen of which have some connection to education. Is it any wonder that a recent BASICS workshop in which sixty human resources professionals were invited to attend yielded only six?

As I sit here in Music City, the only Chamber of Commerce director among nearly six-thousand educators, it helps me to better grasp the importance of bringing business back into the fold. The education community understands that the future of our country largely depends on the commitment made to preparing our young people daunting for the challenges ahead.

I'm assuming, despite some unusual anti-business sentiments from one of the keynote presenters at this conference, that educators understand that they can't accomplish this alone.

Business needs to be here.

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