Melissa Lance has been hired at Wadsworth High School, for the 2023-24 school year, to teach the class, Jobs for Ohio’s Graduates (JOG). Lance has been teaching and been involved with education for many years prior to coming to WHS.
JOG is a class that takes place during the fourth and sixth periods of the day. The class is to give underprivileged students skills to help them graduate and to make sure they are ready for life after high school. Anyone is allowed to take the class here, but it usually consists of 10th or 11th graders.
Last year, JOG was not an actual class, it was a club that met during academic lab, after, or before school. You receive .5 credit for taking this class during the school year.
The students and members of Jobs for Ohio’s Graduates get to go to a conference to let people know and to learn more about the club.
“I and the rest of the students and members of the JOG (Jobs for Ohio’s Graduates) club last year attended the Career Development Conference last year with our career counselor Mrs. Owens,” said Esperanza Ulloa, a Senior at Wadsworth High. “We won second place at the competition at the John S. Knight Center for Student for Service in which we donated food and clothing to the Cloverleaf Care Closet and presented our great works to the judges at the conference.”
The career conference, for 2023, is on November 1. This gives students the opportunity to listen to speakers talk about the JOG club. Lance will be the teacher attending the conference with her students this year.
“Mrs. Lance is super sweet and she makes her students want to learn in a fun environment,” Ulloa said.
Lance did many things including being a bus driver before coming to teach JOG at WHS. She graduated from WHS and got her degree from Ashford University.
“I like to work with students, I was a teacher in Tennessee and I saw how some of them didn’t know what was going on after high school,” Lance said. “So when I moved back up here I saw this job was open and I thought it was a great opportunity to help those seniors follow a path instead of being lost.”
