How One High-Achieving District Made CTE the Most Popular Program

72 → 280 students. 500-person waitlist. 7am zero period fills up first.

That's Williamson County Schools' Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center - in a district where 90%+ of students go to college and the average ACT is above 26.

On Beyond the Box, Dr. Ronald Taylor sits down with Jeremy Qualls, Executive Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Director of CTE. What Jeremy has built breaks the usual pattern:

• CTE positioned as a college-application accelerator, not an alternative to it

• Selection driven by attendance and discipline, not GPA - and the most affluent district's "difficult" kids become the biggest turnaround stories

• A $15M new Innovation Campus, funded through a competitive state grant, with Caterpillar and Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology as founding partners 

• A traditional vocational program with 40 seats and 200 applications

Jeremy's leadership recipe, in his own words: "hire great people who see the need, then get out of the way."

Not a small-district story. A blueprint for what CTE can be in a high-achieving district that decided the "either/or" framing was the wrong question.

🎧 Video and audio links in the first comment.