IT hiring firm pays for computer magnet school Andrew Jackson High to open 'tech lab'
Andrew Jackson High School has classwork on cybersecurity and video-game design.
But fitting 21st-century technology lessons into daily life can be tricky at an aged school in a low-income Northside Jacksonville neighborhood.
The challenge got a little easier Friday, when the school formally opened a “tech lab” where students can work on projects outside of class and information technology professionals will conduct workshops and talk with teens about how they do their jobs.
The school had tech equipment before the lab was set up, but it was confined to classrooms where it can't be used as readily for individual student projects or extra practice to build skills.
The lab was funded primarily by CSI Companies, a Jacksonville-based technology staffing company that paid to repurpose most of the school library and started mentoring a tiny crop of young people (the “Jackson Five”) to help them pursue college and professional careers in tech.
“Representation matters,” said Melissa Fulmore-Hardwick, CSI Companies’ chief information officer and founder of a mentoring nonprofit called Brown Girls in the Boardroom.
Fulmore-Hardwick, who is Black, told people at an event inaugurating the lab that her employer wants Jackson to evolve as one of the places producing talent that will be needed to fill growing demand for well-paid tech workers in Northeast Florida.
Those workers haven’t traditionally come from around Jackson, in a census tract whose median income is less than half of the state norm.
“We want them to level up,” Fulmore-Hardwick said.
The Duval County School Board had similar hopes when it made Jackson a magnet school for cybersecurity and game-design as well as for sports medicine and JROTC, with dual-enrollment letting students earn credit toward associate’s degrees at Florida State College at Jacksonville.
Senior Hanna Blackstock, 17, had entered the school hoping to someday become a doctor, but said she’d discovered “so many opportunities” in tech that she’d shifted her goals.
She’s taken courses in computer networking and routing (Cisco 1 and 2) plus hardware configuration and software configuration as she closes in on her A.S. degree by the time she graduates high school.
Blackstock is one of the five Jackson students CSI Companies picked to mentor.
While it’s not routine for high school students, she landed a part-time internship at CSI Companies’ offices that has lately involved working around an AI-driven anti-phishing platform.
Other Jackson students have been meeting at school with IT pros every second week for workshops that lay out specifics of their work.
That instruction happens in the tech lab, which the company spent about $300,000 refurbishing and outfitting with computers. The school also added other equipment in an adjoining room, setting up donated virtual reality systems.
The rooms give students places they can regularly access to work on their own on technical projects outside the structure of a classroom, said Principal Truitte Moreland.
The equipment and tech space represent a big step forward for Jackson, but Moreland said he’s still hunting for other Jacksonville companies interested in mentoring bright, focused teens discovering IT.
As valuable as the existing mentorships are for the Jackson Five, “we’ve got the Jackson 200,” he said, and landing other businesses can only help.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Andrew Jackson High opens IT 'tech lab' with firm starting mentorships
