Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today about the SciTech regional program at Port Credit Secondary School. I am very pleased that J.F. could join me. J.F. is the head of technology at the school, and certainly a driving force in terms of getting it off the ground.
We are in our second year of this regional program at Port Credit, so we have just grade 9 and grade 10 students. As the principal of the school, I spent well over a year with my staff planning and, should I say, plotting to get it off the ground, because we really had to do this on our own and get it through the board and the board's approval. Because it's regional, any student in Peel can apply for the program. We take under a hundred students per year into the grade 9 level.
The board did support us in terms of giving us $3.8 million worth of refurbishments to our building to accommodate the program, but we are not funded in any way for equipment purchase or for the general running of the program.
To be successful, we need industry partners. We have approached 125 companies. While I'm running a school, this is a challenge. We do not, as yet, have an industry partner, but we're still looking. We need cash and we need in-kind donations to make our program viable.
Our clientele consists of students in both applied and academic streams. That means the hands-on learners who will go straight to work, to apprenticeship training, or to college; and the academically focused students who want to be engineers, scientists, and doctors.
Why did we create this program? There's a need for leading-edge secondary school programs with links to industry and academia. Of skilled trade workers, 52% will retire in the next ten years. A machinist makes more than $100,000 a year, but we can't fill those jobs because kids aren't taking that kind of training. We need to build better pathways for students, and we have to sell those pathways both to the parents and the students.
We have a high school drop-out rate in Ontario that has been reported to be as high as 32%. Our goal at Port Credit Secondary School is to build a stellar, cutting-edge manufacturing program that will give students a firm grounding for a manufacturing career. We want to build awareness in students and parents that manufacturing is a highly viable career path. It is not dingy, dark, and dirty; it's high-tech and it's essential work, and we need to put this in front of kids and parents. In the academic component of our program, we want our students to be accepted to any college or university they choose for post-graduate training in the sciences.
Obviously we need partnerships, and we have academic partnerships. We are partnered with the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Ryerson University. Why did Ryerson partner with us? They currently get first-year students who are wonderful mathematicians but aren't that great at writing a concise report. They want students who have both math and literacy skills. Ryerson works with us on backward design, integrating the Ryerson curriculum of their first-year program into our senior program. Ryerson wants high school graduates who are well grounded in math, physics, chemistry, computer science, and technical writing. Such grounding will equip our graduates with the tools they need to excel not only in aerospace engineering but in many other technical fields.
We are also partnered with Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Brampton. That's much more geared to the manufacturing component.
So we want to provide a strong technical background for our students. Collaboration with post-secondary institutions allows us to develop in our students the tools they need for success in a range of technical careers. Funding and partnerships are our key issues. Bake sales won't cut it. We need industry to step up and partner with us, providing input into curriculum, providing co-op placements and funding us for equipment purchases. Then we can provide our kids with the solid foundation for a future in manufacturing, science, and technology.