At Telstar High School, a regional Extended Learning Opportunities program is linking students with employers across western Maine, expanding access to internships and career exploration.

Already operating with the focus and independence of a young professional, Telstar senior Jonathan Marshall starts each day at 8:30 a.m. with a 15-minute check-in with Woodstock Town Manager Tonya Lewis, then heads to his desk to work independently in the town’s large meeting room.

Since September, Marshall has input hundreds of death certificates from paper forms onto a spread sheet. He has organized vehicle registrations into a centralized system and compiled rabies vaccination records into another database.

Lewis has taught him how to better use spreadsheets and how payroll works. The latter is something he found especially interesting and useful for when he owns a business some day.

At Telstar High School, Extended Learning Opportunities Coordinator Carrie Lynch helps students like Marshall pursue self-directed, career-focused learning. She connects students with resources and opportunities for career development.

“It is a student-by-student endeavor,” she said.

Both of the grants Lynch and Extended Learning Opportunities is utilizing will be spent by the end of the summer.

“Right now my position has been put into our local (School Administrative District 44) budget for this next year. So we are waiting for the budget to pass. Fingers crossed that that happens,” Lynch said.

Her initial Extended Learning Opportunities-funded grant allowed them to take the school’s school-to-work program from two to five students per year and expand it.

“The goal was to build out relationships with community partners, so we could have more students, internships, work experiences and pre-apprentices … ” she said.

A second $1.2 million federal grant funded Extended Learning Opportunities coordinators at five area high schools, creating the state’s first regional model and enabling smaller schools to partner with larger employers.

“When you can leverage the numbers of five schools then you have the numbers to bring some larger employers to the table,” Lynch said.

In the regional model with Lynch, other coordinators are Vince Kloskowski, Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School; Gretchen Kimball, Buckfield Middle/High School; Noah Preble, Dirigo High School in Dixfield; and Christopher Brennick, Mountain Valley High School in Rumford. They plan to continue collaborating beyond the grant.

Joint efforts include a medical boot camp at UMaine Augusta held April 7. Students will also visit Brunswick Landing to explore startups, entrepreneurship and aviation careers and they will attend each other’s career fairs, too.

However, Lynch said, Bethel-area businesses “have really come to the table with this.” Of the 150 to 200 businesses in the database, examples include Bethel Rescue where Addy Koskela found success, Davis Concrete, Everett Excavation, MTK Contracting and Field Plumbing.

They are “not just willing but excited to engage with students,” she said.

Students are working in animal care, day care and the trades, where interest is growing. Lynch recently partnered with MaineHealth Stephens Hospital in Norway; two students are working in surgical nursing and respiratory therapy and observing other departments.

“We had to break the mold with (senior) Vivi Charette. She wanted to be a licensed real estate developer, which is not an option until age 18,” Lynch said.

Charette worked in an adjacent field as an intern with Wheeler’s Insurance this fall.

“On her own (she) completed a real estate licensure course, sat for the exam, earned her state and national real estate license, and was hired by Barefoot Realty in Norway as an entry-level agent,” Lynch said.

Lynch mainly works with 11th and 12th graders, but they build the scaffolding early, asking students to establish academic and personal goals each semester starting in ninth grade.

“Finding out in high school that something is not what you thought it was is just as valuable as finding out what you do like,” Lynch said.

She pointed to a student who pursued job shadows because he was unsure of his path. He did not gravitate toward placements with a surveying company, a stint at the Mount Washington Observatory or coursework in nonpiloted drone flight.

In the end, Lynch said, he chose to attend Central Maine Community College as a full-time, second-semester, dual-enrollment student in exercise science.

In 2024, Gavin Mitchell opted for a fifth year at Telstar High School with just a few courses left for graduation. His goals were to earn his driver’s license, a commercial driver’s license Class D and his diploma. Even now, while fully employed, “He checks in with me and asks for help with resume updates,” Lynch said. “He credits the ELO program with helping him graduate.”

Lynch, a former high school teacher, spent a sabbatical year in a college counseling office and worked at Gould Academy in Bethel as a counselor before feeling a pull to return to public schools.

“This isn’t something that readily exists in public schools, particularly rural schools,” she said.

“As we are asking kids to look around and make decisions about whether or not they want to stay in Maine as adults, I think we have to give them hope about how they are going to do that,” she said.

At Woodstock Town Office, Marshall has described his first assignment as “painstaking.” He penciled property owners’ names onto pages of town maps.

“It took me awhile,” he said. “It taught me some mental discipline, because it was the same thing over and over again.”

The task also gave him a better understanding of land ownership in his hometown — and showed him he doesn’t mind detailed, repetitive work.

His most recent project involved merging birth certificates that had been kept in separate binders based on whether the child’s parents were married — one spanning 1964-1992, the other 1992-2020. He even came across his own.

What began as painstaking work has become something more — a lesson in focus, patience and the kind of detail-oriented work he has found he enjoys, so much so that he chose to stay on at Woodstock Town Office for a second semester.