Trisha Nelson has recently taken over the Diversified Career Prep class for Littlefield High School.
Nelson said she has previously taught at the Primary school.
“This is my first year teaching this class,” she said. “This is my 12th year as a teacher. I taught at the primary and I taught music and then I taught our family and consumer sciences classes here at high school and then...I have three classes of DCP and then I have two classes of dual credit and child development.”
Nelson said DCP students go out into the community and work for high school credit.
“This class, I have students that go out into the community and they work,” she said. “They have to put in at least 10 hours a week and then they also take the class here at school and they’re gaining school credit for high school to be able to graduate by working.”
Nelson said the class teaches a lot of job skills.
“We teach a bunch of interviewing skills, job application skills, basically how to be a good employee, how to deal with certain situations in jobs, that’s basically what they’re doing is learning how the world of work works,” she said.
The class has previously been taught by three other teachers, but Nelson said she has no plans to change how the class works.
“I run it the exact same how Ms. Moss has run it before because she’s a veteran teacher and she did awesome so she has left me everything that she has done. That way it can just continue to be ran the same way,” she said.
Nelson said her class also sells Christmas ads to businesses around town.
“I sent all of my DCP students out, they go around to businesses and sell Christmas ads and it’s a good fundraiser for us, but also for the newspaper as well...The students get to use some of those skills they’ve learned in class to talk to businesses... We’ve actually been writing thank you cards to all of those businesses so I can get those mailed out, but it helps with some of their speaking skills because some of us are not strong at speaking to other people,” she said.
Nelson said the money the students raise for selling ads goes toward treating the students to lunch and various gift cards.
“So, this week for the testing, I’ve taking them out to eat and they’ve gotten to choose the restaurant and we’ve gone as a group to go eat during the testing time and then other than that we use the money for gift card winners when we will have somebody from the community come in and actually interview the students and so our winner will earn a gift card or any other supplies that we need,” she said.
Nelson said she had her students start selling ads around Thanksgiving.
“We started the week before Thanksgiving and then we went on Thanksgiving break and we finished the week after Thanksgiving. We sold 99,” she said.
Nelson said her students had a goal of selling two ads each.
“My goal was for each student to sell two and I have 45 [students] so that was 90 and I had one girl who sold eight ads,” she said.
Nelson said the students who sold over two ads got a gift card of their choosing.
“My students that sold over two, that’s what they had to get, they got a certain amount on gift cards and they got to choose where they got their gift card from,” she said.