MTI to give diplomas to 273 graduates today

The 273 members of the Mitchell Technical Institute graduating Class of 2009 will being looking to the future following today’s 5 p.m. commencement exercises at the Corn Palace.

Keynote speaker Milt Dougherty will be on hand to help them consider the possibilities in his address “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be,” during which he will discuss the roles of technical education and education in general.

“I heard (Dougherty) when he came to Mitchell as an outside consultant for Apple Computer,” said MTI Vice President for Technology Dan Muck. “He’s got reallife education experience and he’s fun to listen to.”

Graduates in this 41st MTI graduating class earned 187 associate of applied science degrees, 11 two-year diplomas and 75 oneyear diplomas. They come from 100 South Dakota communities and 10 additional states.

Greg Von Wald said his initial year as MTI president has had many successes and a one major disappointment. Von Wald said that disappointment was coming home empty-handed from the 2009 legislative session in Pierre. At that session, lawmakers cut $3 million in funding from the state’s tech schools.

“We’re at 2005 levels of funding, and it necessitated a tuition hike for the 2009-2010 school year,” he said.

On a more positive note, he said, MTI’s power sports program was popular and will graduate its first class tonight. A special edition 40th anniversary motorcycle built by the class will be on display in the Corn Palace lobby, where raffle tickets will be sold.

The school’s new wind technology program is also now in place and will begin this fall. Students will also have a new technology building that will be ready for use next year at the south campus.

But tonight is all about wrapping up the 2008-2009 school year.

Dougherty, superintendent of Little River School District in central Kansas, is an Apple Distinguished Educator who also has been called one of the nation’s top 10 tech-savvy superintendents.

“But I’m not a techie,” said Dougherty, who prefers to call himself an educational futurist with an interest in leadership. “My job is to look at what’s coming and to help us prepare for it.”

He remains on retainer with the Little River district, but Dougherty also pursues consulting jobs that take him around the world. He does not handle education gently. It’s an industry to which he says change sometimes comes slowly.

“A buddy of mine said ‘you change schools like you move a cemetery — one body at a time.’ We need to do a better job individualizing for kids and engaging them in the learning process. Without a two-to-one teacher-student ratio, I don’t know how you do that without technology,” he said.

Meaningful changes in education are happening in charter and home schools, he said, as communities and parents strive to find better ways to help their kids.

“They’re not anti-public school. They’re just saying, ‘My kids are not getting what they need at public schools,’ ” he said.

Dougherty recently returned from Korea, where he’s helping that country set up distance learning initiatives. China is next on his schedule. Asian countries are hungry for English-speaking instruction, he said.

“Don’t believe everything you hear on CNN. A lot of people want what America has,” he said

In Korea, kids go to public school from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and then head off to “hagwons,” or private academies from 3 to 10 p.m.

An Asian guide once told him “It’s not that we’re smarter (than American students); it’s that we have a lot more school.”

In the 1972 best-seller “Future Shock,” author Alvin Toffler rattled a world poised for digital revolution when he predicted the accelerating pace of technology could be too much for mankind to handle.

“Futurists are rarely wrong on what happens. What they’re wrong about is the timeline,” said Dougherty.

There was a time when a student could drop out of school, pick up a union job, work in a factory and retire 30 years later with a good pension. “That’s not possible any longer,” he said.

The skills needed to survive in modern society are dramatically different, he said, and schools, in turn, have to question why they teach what they do.

Tags: milt dougherty, von wald, news, mti, graduation, futurist, commencement