Elizabeth Pedersen Presenting

MMCRU Skills USA Members With Govenor

Skills USA Day 8th Graders

Gingerbread Crew

Teacher Breakfast

Corn Pickers

ABC Compeitions

You may have read other articles or even heard about industrial technology students participating in activites in our community or maybe evening competing around the state in different skilled trades competitions and wondered “what’s this all about?” This is a nationally-recognied student organization at MMCRU called SkillsUSA.
So what is SkillsUSA? It is a partnership of students, teachers and industry working together to ensure America has a skilled workforce. We help each student excel. A nonprofit national education association, SkillsUSA serves middle-school, high-school and college/postsecondary students preparing for leadership careers in trade, technical and skilled service occupations, “it’s not just shop”
What is the mission? SkillsUSA empowers its members to become world-class workers, leaders and responsible American citizens. We improve the quality of our nation’s future skilled workforce through the development of SkillsUSA Framework skills that include personal, workplace and technical skills grounded in academics. Our vision is to produce the most highly skilled workforce in the world, providing every member the opportunity for career success.
SkillsUSA serves more than 333,527 students and instructors annually. This includes 19,019 instructors who join as professional members. Including alumni, SkillsUSA membership totals over 394,000. SkillsUSA has served nearly 14 million annual members cumulatively since 1965 and is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Labor as a successful model of employer-driven workforce development.
Throughout this whole year, our student members have been doing a lot of activities as a chapter. We try to accomplish a lot, whether that is giving back to the community, improving our personal skills, or just simply having fun as a group. This year, we started off with a rather large zoom call for our officer candidates. This zoom call was an Elevate Conference with SkillUSA chapters from all over the country as well as 2 US territories. The purpose of this was to better the leadership skills and teamwork skills for the member who wished to become an officer this year. The call was very successful, and had a great impact on the members that got to attend not only growing as leaders, but simply interacting with others outside our community. The next project we attacked was probably one of the biggest service projects our chapter has ever accomplished. This last November, almost every member (60+) in our chapter bundled up and came out to help pick corn for a cause along highway 3 in a field owned by Matt and Angie Schnepf. We harvested corn that was left standing as a snow block on highway 3 and tossed it all in a wagon. From there we sold that corn to Little Sioux Corn Processors to generate funds for the family of Kam Steffen, one of our shop students who was struggling with health problems at the time.
We also like to show off our skills and hard work from time to time, so we took some students to the ABC Skilled Trades competition in Des Moines. There was a construction team as well as independent welding competitions, which was highlighted with Dawson Pick finishing second in the first year division welding. Christmas time is also a blast if you’re a member of our program, as every year we put up a Christmas tree in downtown Marcus for the Hometown Christmas and decorate it with shop and SkillsUSA items. This year we also continued our annual gingerbread house building with the third graders. By doing this we get them excited for SkillUSA when they are in high school and help them understand how a building needs structure. This event is always fun for all ages.
All of this builds up for the most eventful week for us as February is national CTE (Career and Technical Education) Month and the second week in February is national SkillsUSA week. The week is filled with different themed days to give back and recognize everyone that has helped us up until this point. To celebrate SkillsUSA week this year, we participated as much as we could, as we do every year. We started off with a staff breakfast on Monday where the members come to school extra early to make and serve breakfast to all of the teachers and staff members. Then on Tuesday we like to give back to our janitors for all of their hard work they do and help them with all of their daily tasks. Wednesday is when we have a special guest come in and speak to the chapter about how to be successful in life. This year we had Dave Freese from RJ Thomas Mfg tell us about what he does and the opportunities within the skills trades industries. Thursday we went over to Remsen to talk to the eighth graders about SkillsUSA and shop classes as they rotated to several stations, while the high school students familiarize them with different areas in the shop or SkillsUSA chapter. This year, we ended the week with a chapter outing and got down to Sioux City to watch some Musketeers hockey, which is always a blast for the group to just simply have fun with one another and our instructors.
During SkillsUSA week this year our officer team was elected to make a very exciting trip down to the state capital. The team went to the rotunda, acted as state officers, and talked to legislators all day at a booth about what SkillsUSA is and what we do as a chapter. As it was CTE day, they were able to watch Governor Renolds sign the proclamation to declare February as CTE month. Upcoming we have SkillsUSA state competitions in April. There will be a group of students that will be traveling to Ankeny to compete in any competition they wish that is CTE related. This is an exciting event and if anyone advances they will be competing at nationals which is held in Atlanta, Georgia in June. Until then and further we as a chapter will continue to grow ourselves and our skills as a whole and everyone individually. If you have further questions about SkillsUSA or our industrial tech program, reach out to our instructors, a student of our program, or better yet just come up to the school and we’ll show you what makes our program so special!