If my school system was typical, and I have no reason to believe it wasn’t, what happened was that individual high schools dropped their trades oriented classes but the school system opened a dedicated vocational/“tech” high school. That means in order to take any such classes you’d have to completely switch schools, or at least drive there halfway through the school day or something. So, on top of having to arrange your own transportation instead of taking the school bus, you’d probably also have schedule conflicts and be forced to choose between the vocational classes and things like gifted/AP academic classes. And finally, you would also be disincentivized against that (at least in my social circle) by the stigma that only the stupid kids who couldn’t hack the normal curriculum, troublemakers, and teen moms would go to an ‘alternative’ school (which was wrong in retrospect, of course, but the key phrase is “in retrospect”).
To add insult to injury, my AP physics class was held in the classroom that used to be for the school’s shop class. In addition to a whole bunch of intriguing CNC equipment and other neat science/engineering doodads scattered around the back and sides of the classroom, there was a huge attached storage room that had all the traditional woodworking power tools. And we never had the opportunity to use fucking any of it!
If my school system was typical, and I have no reason to believe it wasn’t, what happened was that individual high schools dropped their trades oriented classes but the school system opened a dedicated vocational/“tech” high school. That means in order to take any such classes you’d have to completely switch schools, or at least drive there halfway through the school day or something. So, on top of having to arrange your own transportation instead of taking the school bus, you’d probably also have schedule conflicts and be forced to choose between the vocational classes and things like gifted/AP academic classes. And finally, you would also be disincentivized against that (at least in my social circle) by the stigma that only the stupid kids who couldn’t hack the normal curriculum, troublemakers, and teen moms would go to an ‘alternative’ school (which was wrong in retrospect, of course, but the key phrase is “in retrospect”).
To add insult to injury, my AP physics class was held in the classroom that used to be for the school’s shop class. In addition to a whole bunch of intriguing CNC equipment and other neat science/engineering doodads scattered around the back and sides of the classroom, there was a huge attached storage room that had all the traditional woodworking power tools. And we never had the opportunity to use fucking any of it!