Southeast High School's Hand Tool Olympics

Mississippi's Workforce and State Leaders are emphasizing Career & Technical Education significantly. With this in mind, Southeast High School sponsored a Hand Tool Olympics Competition today for their first-year construction students to prepare properly.

"Today we have our first-year students hand whole Olympicsfirst-year and that's where first year students and our hand tool module. They get to showcase all the skills that they've been learning and basically bring their performance profiles to life," stated Jeremy Smith the Con instruction Teacher.

This isn’t the first time for them to host this type of competition but due to covid, it prevented them from competing for a while.

"We did about five years ago. Covid kind of slowed it down a little bit, but we're resuming it this year and the kids are really excited and have really been doing really well today," said Smith.

Smith says that have around 15 first-year construction students and says by doing this competition helps students get a feel of how the real work situations will be in the construction field.

Smith stated, "It helps them because they get to basically compete with one another. And they will also be graded on accuracy. So it just really puts their skills in a real work situation where maybe you had to complete something a little faster than normal."

Mississippi's Workforce and State Leaders have partnered with State Agencies and Community-Based Organizations and High schools across the state to provide Employer-Driven, Career-Technical Education and Workforce Skills training.