CASCADE — Cascade High School was treated to its first-ever job fair on Monday, with more than 25 organizations represented, informing students about the opportunities that are available to them after graduation. That included Lieutenant Governor Kristen Juras starting the morning by discussing scholarship opportunities students should look into.
Cascade High School has nearly 100 students enrolled and students were able to listen to professionals from many career fields including some local jobs. School officials said the school and staff were supportive in setting it up and even had parents of students talk to the students to tell them about those local jobs.
Principal Nichole Pieper says she and Town Clerk Jodie Campbell worked together to find something that could serve their students in a meaningful way and got a lot of support from the community as well when they came up with the idea for a job fair.
“I think a lot of our students are unaware of how many different options they have after they graduate from high school. One of the biggest benefits of having this job fair is that our students are going to be able to see different jobs in the community that they live in and start looking at what classes they might want to be taking to prepare themselves for that,” Pieper said.
Students were given pamphlets with questions to ask people and were designed to give them more access to jobs they might be interested in after school. Campbell said the job fair didn’t take much to set up and that it is well worth it to show students what is out there.
“We wanted to find something that Cascade Schools could do that would help our students individually as well as collectively. But being so close to Great Falls and Helena we can’t offer all the things they offer so we wanted to find something we could work with and start expanding on,” Campbell said.
Based on the support the school got for the job fair, they envision hosting more to continue to show teens what is available to them.
