Maritime Careers Get Attention From School Counselors

“‘I was impressed by how many people wanted to get involved,’ Brandon Phillips told The Waterways Journal. He was speaking about his experience at the American School Counselor Association’s annual meeting at New Orleans in July.

Phillips is a compliance and personnel manager at Riverview Tug Service and a board member of We Work the Waterways. WWW executive director Errin Howard and Pam Maxwell, director of programs and operations at WWW, also attended the ASCA event. WWW’s booth was part of Mariners Row, a collection of maritime-related companies exhibiting at the conference.

The ‘Row’ was the brainchild of Todd Wright, editor at American Maritime Officers. Phillips said the row actually was made up of three rows of booths and featured about 40 maritime-related groups. Wright said the inspiration for it came three years ago, when he attended ASCA’s annual conference in Kansas City, and none of the school counselors there had heard of the maritime sector or the opportunities it offered young people. The first Mariners Row in Long Beach, Calif., last year featured about 50 maritime-related groups, including all of the major maritime academies, commercial shippers and labor unions.

Many of the nation’s maritime academies saw upticks in enrollment last year, in part because of marketing and recruiting efforts like Mariners Row, which focuses on reintroducing maritime into the classroom” …

Read the full article here! Story by David Murray, The Waterways Journal Weekly.
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