Learn to Earn Dayton Is Building Connected Pathways to Career Success

Learn to Earn Dayton Dayton, Ohio

Across the country, communities have made real progress in getting more students to graduate from high school and take their next steps, whether that means enrolling in college, entering a training program or stepping into the workforce. For many students, the gap between finishing high school and securing a career that pays a living wage remains wide, and the systems designed to close that gap are often fragmented, disconnected or out of reach for the students who need them most.

A purposeful pathway changes that equation. It is the designed sequence of experiences that connects a young person’s journey through high school and beyond, including high-quality advising, accelerated coursework and career-connected learning. Those three components help build momentum toward credential or degree completion and employment. According to the Next Generation Insights Hub, 78% of high school students want to determine their career plans before graduating, but only 13% feel prepared to do so. The gap is not a lack of ambition. It is a lack of connected, well-designed systems to support students along the way.

Students need more than a diploma.

They need a pathway and the advising, coursework and real-world experience to move through it with support.

According to an analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, by 2031:

72%

of all jobs will require postsecondary education by 2031

85%

of jobs paying a family-sustaining wage will go to workers with at least a middle-skills credential

In Dayton, Ohio, that work is underway. Across the Dayton region, more students are graduating from high school than ever before. Valley View Local Schools reached a 98.6% graduation rate in 2025, and the number of students meeting Ohio’s college, career, workforce and military readiness benchmarks has increased steadily year over year. These gains reflect real progress and create a foundation for the next stage of the work.

The challenge is what comes after. Stacy Schweikart, CEO of Learn to Earn Dayton, describes it directly:

Far too few of our students are enrolling in postsecondary opportunities despite the fact that we have really strong higher education institutions across our region. The bigger challenge is that even fewer complete a postsecondary degree within six years.

Stacy Schweikart, CEO of Learn to Earn Dayton

Dayton, Ohio

Learn to Earn Dayton, a StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network member and inaugural grantee of the Pathways Impact Fund at StriveTogether, is working with partners across Montgomery County to close that gap. Learn to Earn Dayton brings together K–12 school districts, postsecondary institutions, employers, community organizations and policy partners around shared data and a shared goal: that 60% of working-age adults in Montgomery County will hold a degree or credential that leads to a high-growth, high-wage career.

Getting there requires more than programs. It requires a connected system that is designed to support students at every transition from early childhood through employment.

Building pathways from the start

Learn to Earn Dayton’s approach is grounded in the full cradle-to-career continuum. At the early end, the organization works closely with the Montgomery County Two-Generation Collaborative, a network of community organizations that serves children and families together. Miami Valley Child Development Centers, the Head Start provider in Southwest Ohio, reaches nearly 3,000 children annually across three counties.

The data sets the stakes. Fewer than 30% of children in Ohio enter kindergarten ready to succeed. When students start behind, they are more likely to stay behind throughout their K–12 experience, which is why early childhood investment is treated as part of the pathways strategy, not separate from it.

Shared data infrastructure supports this work. Learn to Earn Dayton’s community outcomes dashboard gives partners visibility into outcomes down to the census tract level, helping organizations understand where disparities are greatest and coordinate their responses.

Working in real-life situations has made me more comfortable for life after high school. I already know what I’m going to be doing for the next few months and I’m excited for life after high school.

Trinity

Senior student at Valley View High School

Advising, accelerated coursework and career-connected learning

The Commission on Purposeful Pathways, convened by StriveTogether, identifies three core experiences that form the foundation of a high-quality pathway: high-quality advising, accelerated coursework and career-connected learning. In the Dayton region, all three are operating at scale through a structured, data-driven model.

High-quality advising is delivered through a team of career navigators, many housed within the Montgomery County Educational Service Center’s Career Connected Learning and Workforce Division. Career navigators are embedded in school districts and work directly with students to connect academic coursework to career interests and postsecondary plans. They use YouScience, an aptitude and interest assessment, to help students identify strengths and explore career clusters aligned to labor market demand.

Sophomores, juniors and seniors at Valley View High School now participate in career advising and pathway planning. When YouScience results showed high student aptitude and interest in health care, the district added health care course offerings to match. The approach is producing measurable results. Chronic absenteeism dropped to 17.8% in 2023-24, below both Ohio’s statewide rate of 25.6% and the district’s own annual performance goal. College, Career, Workforce and Military Readiness scores have risen from 43.2% in 2021-22 to 57% in 2022-23 to 62.3% in 2023-24.

Katie Grothaus, West Regional Career Navigator for the Career Pathway Support Network, describes the value of the role this way: “Students are walking through an English class and they have no clue what they’re doing. A career navigator can come along and say — do you know the reason that you’re taking this and how this pertains to you and your future and your career plans? A career navigator is one that helps put the picture together, so it makes sense. So instead of a million different puzzle pieces, all of a sudden you’re taking this puzzle and putting it together to make a picture for that student that is all about them and their own career picture.”

Accelerated coursework gives students access to college credit while still in high school. This can include dual enrollment, which allows students to take college courses and earn credit simultaneously at the high school and college level. In Ohio, the College Credit Plus program allows students to take dual enrollment courses at no cost, earning both high school and college credit simultaneously. Research shows that students who complete dual enrollment are more likely to graduate from college. For students from lower-income households, it also significantly reduces the cost of a postsecondary credential.

Lee, a senior at Valley View High School, began taking dual enrollment courses in eighth grade. He plans to study mechanical engineering at Sinclair Community College before transferring to the University of Dayton. “By signing up for dual enrollment, I got more familiarized with how a college course will run. I feel prepared and excited for college,” he said. “When I graduate high school, I’m not only graduating with a diploma but I have over 30 college credit hours done toward my degree.”

Career-connected learning bridges classroom instruction with real-world experience. Through partnerships with more than 400 employers, the Strategic Ohio Council for Higher Education (SOCHE) places students from high school through postdoctoral level into paid work-based learning opportunities, supporting approximately 1,000 students per year. When students complete internships with employer partners, 95% of those who are job-ready are converted to full-time positions.

Trinity, a senior at Valley View High School, is currently a paid safety companion at Miami Valley Hospital. Her pathway started when her counselor and career navigator asked whether she was interested in working in health care. She applied, completed orientation and has since spent 12-hour shifts providing patient care. The experience has shaped her postsecondary plan: she will pursue her nursing degree at Sinclair Community College while working full-time at the hospital.

Aligning systems for broader impact

Building individual experiences is necessary but not sufficient. What makes pathways durable is the alignment of the systems that deliver them.

Learn to Earn Dayton functions as the regional intermediary that connects those systems. The organization brings district superintendents, higher education leaders, employers and community partners together around shared data, shared strategy and shared accountability. Dr. Shannon M. Cox, superintendent of the Montgomery County Educational Service Center, describes this as a two-pronged partnership. “We see it as a public and nonprofit merged together to solve problems for our community,” said Dr. Cox.

The statewide academic data dashboard plays a central role. It aggregates state report card data, postsecondary enrollment and completion data, and community-level indicators so partners can benchmark their progress against peers and identify where to focus. For rural districts like Valley View, the dashboard provides access to comparative data that would otherwise require significant time and resources to compile.

Cross-sector data sharing has also enabled new approaches to persistent barriers. In partnership with the Dayton Municipal Court, Learn to Earn Dayton built an eviction prevention pipeline: a family is faced with eviction, court data is cross-referenced against Dayton Public Schools enrollment to identify affected students. Those students receive wraparound services before housing instability becomes a crisis that disrupts their schooling. “The only way this work is possible is through a partnership with a provider like Learn to Earn Dayton,” said Dayton Municipal Clerk of Court Marty Gehres.

Scaling through policy and investment

Learn to Earn Dayton’s local work has contributed to state-level policy change. The organization was instrumental in advancing Senate Bill 208, signed into law in 2025, which mandates the creation of regional intermediary partnerships like Learn to Earn Dayton in every Jobs Ohio area across the state. The legislation moves regional education partnerships from programmatic grants to permanent infrastructure.

“Because of SB 208, we’re shifting from programmatic grants to mandated permanent infrastructure so that we’ll have a connected network of regional partnerships advancing career outcomes across Ohio,” Stacy said.

As an inaugural Pathways Impact Fund grantee, Learn to Earn Dayton is now scaling its pathways work beyond Montgomery County. With support from the Fund, the organization will deepen career navigation services in existing district partnerships and expand to two large public school districts in adjacent counties by adding more than 2,500 students to high-quality career-connected learning.

“Learn to Earn Dayton is expanding their pathways programming across the state in partnership with their State Department of Education and Workforce,” said John Garcia, executive director of the Pathways Impact Fund at StriveTogether. “They are the connective glue that brings education systems and employers together and they have the regional connections, the expertise and the understanding of their community to do this work at scale.”

The path forward

The data in the Dayton region shows what becomes possible when systems are designed to work together. High school graduation rates are up. Career readiness scores are rising. Kindergarten readiness in targeted communities is trending positively. Students are entering postsecondary education with college credit already earned and career plans already formed.

The work ahead is to extend those outcomes further along the continuum and to ensure that more students who graduate from high school enroll in postsecondary education, complete a credential and enter careers that provide long-term economic stability.

More than half of the in-demand jobs in the greater Dayton region will require more than a high school diploma. When every student has access to a well-designed pathway, more of them will be ready to fill those jobs. Learn to Earn Dayton is building that system, one partnership and one student at a time.

Learn to Earn Dayton Is Building Connected Pathways to Career Success