Episode 70: Provo CAPS

Dicembre 13th, 2024 /
Alexander Glaves /

Sup con il Sup

00:00 / 25:15

Welcome everyone to the next episode of Provo City School District’s What’s Up With The Sup’ podcast. I am Superintendent Wendy Dau. This week, I am joined by Riley Forreston, a junior from Timpview High School, Parker Rivera, a junior from Provo High School, and Shiv Patel, a senior from Provo High School.

They are students in our CAPS program, and we discussed the program itself and the specific project that they worked on this semester.

Ma prima, esaminiamo i nostri aggiornamenti.

At the December 10th board meeting, the Board of Education approved a change to this year’s school calendar. This change means that the school year will now end on Wednesday, May 21st, which is two days earlier than originally planned.
- This information has been emailed to all parents and has been posted on the district website and social media.
Timpview High School is spreading holiday cheer with two ways to give back this season.
- First, by donating essential snacks like granola bars, water bottles, and mac and cheese cups to the district’s food pantry.
- Or second, by selecting a gift tag from their Sub for Santa angel tree. Each angel tree tag represents one gift for a local individual ranging from $5 to $20 and can be picked up in room N 232 or during Timpview’s holiday events throughout December.
There are three new policies for review on our district website.
- Go to Provo.Edu, click on Policies, Forms, and Documents. You can click on Review Draft Policies Here.
- You will see a draft of Policy 3118, our Open Enrollment Policy, Policy 3160, Student Residency, and Policy 4400, Assessment and State Testing.
The School Board is considering three options for use of the Old Dixon Middle School site and would love to hear your feedback.
- Please visit the district website to learn information about the options and complete a feedback form.
We have two opportunities for parents to be involved with Provo City School District.
- Uno di questi è il Comitato per le connessioni con i cittadini, che si riunirà e fornirà feedback al distretto su una serie di argomenti.
- The second committee is a parent advisory committee for parents of current students within our schools. The purpose of this committee is for district leadership to understand the challenges and concerns that our students have as they attend our schools so that we can problem-solve with you on how to make schools welcoming spaces for all.
- If you would like to serve on either of these committees, please complete the application that has been emailed to all parents. We will be reviewing those applications after the winter break and notify those that have been selected.
The next school board meeting will be a study session and business meeting on Tuesday, January 14th.
- Per ulteriori informazioni, consultare il sito web del distretto man mano che ci si avvicina alla data.
- And we welcome our new board member, Emily Harrison, who will be replacing Rebecca Nielsen.
Continue watching for my weekly video casts in your email every Monday. These video casts provide one place for you to learn about important things happening across our district.

Welcome everyone to this week’s episode of What’s Up With the Sup’. I am here with three students who are part of Provo City School District’s CAPS program. So I’m going to have each of our guests introduce themselves, tell us what school they’re from, and then I’ll have them talk a little bit about what CAPS stands for and what the program is about.

So let’s start with you.

Shiv Patel: Okay. I’m Shiv Patel. I’m a senior at Provo High School. And yeah, that’s…

Wendy Dau: that’s awesome.

Shiv Patel: CAPS is great. Yeah.

Wendy Dau: Welcome.

Shiv Patel: Thank you.

Parker Rivera: My name is Parker Rivera. I’m a junior at Provo High School, and I’m part of the CAPS team.

Riley Forreston: I’m Riley Forreston. I’m from Timpview, actually, a junior, and I’m also part of the CAPS team.

Only Timpview got to represent, you know.

Wendy Dau: That’s right. You do. We have to make sure we are representing both schools, right? So tell us a little bit about what CAPS is. Like what does this look like in your schedule? Why did you sign up for it? And each one of you can add something to it. So whoever wants to start.

Shiv Patel: So basically, CAPS will take up your third and fourth period of your A Day schedule. And you will be transported here by bus, or you can drive yourself to the NuSkin building in the Provo downtown headquarters area. And then once you show up, you have signed up for four different strands. We have a business and entrepreneurship strand.

We have the health science strand, engineering strand, as well as the digital media strand. So all of us are from business and entrepreneurship.

Wendy Dau: Fantastico.

Parker Rivera: So yeah, like he was saying, CAPS takes up the third and fourth period of A Days. Again, we’re trying to have it so that we can have B Days and A Days for more accessibility between students.

But, how it works is you get to go to a professional environment, such as NuSkin, instead of having to go into a classroom and just have any other old class, you go into an actual workplace where there’s real employees, and there you learn how you’re going to have to work in a workplace in the future.

What do you want to add, Riley?

Riley Forreston: Well, I thought it was actually just really cool to be there in general. I mean, it’s like an actual workplace, like Parker was saying. Like, I actually came to CAPS because it was just such an interesting experience. The fact that you got to work in a real building, like NuSkin, was just so cool to me.

And it was just awesome. So…

Wendy Dau: You feel very grown up when you get to do that.

Riley Forreston: Yeah, yeah. A little stressed out too, you know? Yeah.

Wendy Dau: So CAPS stands for Center for Advanced Professional Studies. It partners you with actual businesses that need you to do something for them, right? And so you’re learning how to work with a supervisor.

You’re learning how to work with customers potentially. So tell us a little bit about your project, what company you worked with, what your mentors were like, and just how this all rolls out.

Shiv Patel: So just real quick, CAPS, either you have a actual business that you work for. Okay. Or in our case, we just work for CAPS.

Wendy Dau: Ok, perfetto.

Shiv Patel: We were like an odd ones out. And the health science team. They work a little bit differently. Every strand works is slightly different. That’s basically the overview and like instructors treat it like it’s a real job. You know, you have to clock in on time. You have to meet your deliverables, have meetings with your client and all of the main things.

Yeah. So our project was, um, the CAPS media agency.

Parker Rivera: So yeah, our whole job and duty was to just market and bring more awareness to the program as a whole, get more students excited and more information about what the program is and how it can change everyone’s lives.

Riley Forreston: I actually didn’t want this project at first, but when I started it, it was actually really interesting.

Wendy Dau: Good job being honest.

Riley Forreston: Well, yeah, I gotta be honest, but it was actually really interesting to try and actually promote CAPS because the thing is, I didn’t really know CAPS existed until I heard from like my mom, but she, she saw from like super obscure, like a LinkedIn post or something. We were excited to like actually promote CAPS in our own like unique ways.

We were able to just use our own methods to popularize it and show it off. So Shiv, do you want to talk about some of the methods?

Shiv Patel: Yeah. So like with our, um, initial meeting with Jan Jardine, the director of CAPS, we really hit home on, we want to spread awareness to high school students and not their parents.

We want our target audience to be, the students itself, we want them to be excited about CAPS.

Wendy Dau: We don’t want mom just signing you up. We want to make sure we have kids that really want to be part of this.

Shiv Patel: For sure.

Wendy Dau: That makes sense.

Shiv Patel: We really did not have a plan. All of us were kind of just thrown in here with no background knowledge. Jan didn’t really have a perspective from what she wanted. We, she wanted a social media presence for sure. And that was the first thing we worked on. So Parker.

Parker Rivera: Again. So when we first took over the project, most projects had like clients and they had deliverables. What do you do?

We kind of made them up as we went, we kind of wrote our own path. So that’s the thing about this whole project is you’re constantly coming up with new ideas of how you can get that to market, how to target that audience more and more, and to bring more success, but yeah, a little bit about what we did is we, we decided to start an Instagram page because it’s the most used platform for all of our target market.

Wendy Dau: I know I’ve started following it. It was pretty, all of a sudden it came up and I was like, wait, what? Yeah, that was great.

Shiv Patel: That was awesome to see you on the following list.

Parker Rivera: Yeah. So for our project, we created a logo. And we started Instagram from scratch and we were able to scale it up to 75 plus followers, a hundred plus likes, and some of our content.

And we were really proud of that. And we were able to see an exponential growth between how much our target market was interacting with our content.

Wendy Dau: È fantastico.

Shiv Patel: Our, um, background goal was for the Instagram was to have it be made in a way whereas once we leave and the next group takes over this project, it’s super simple for them to get it back up and running, have posts, keep going.

We wanted to build it up. So the foundation is very strong. And it can be easily taken over.

Wendy Dau: That’s always a challenge, right? Yep. For sure.

Riley Forreston: Also, we didn’t just make an Instagram, we also focused on making posters because the caps lacked any physical media to show it off. So I was mostly focused on the posters while they focused on the digital side of it.

So I made sure that the posters captured each strand and each of like the things you can learn from it. And it was just a really cool experience actually learning. Took a little bit to make though because, you know, everyone had their own critiques on what they wanted on it.

Wendy Dau: Of course. We all have our own opinions about what that looks like.

Shiv Patel: We went to every single strand. Like, as a focus group, kind of, to see what they wanted for their poster. And Riley was a big part of getting feedback and criticism and using that to make the posters better.

Riley Forreston: There was a lot of feedback.

Wendy Dau: Which is what you’re going to face in the real workforce, right?

You’re going to get a lot of feedback from supervisors and sometimes colleagues. And a lot of unwanted feedback that you didn’t want to hear about, so that’s a good experience for you. Tell me a little bit about why the multiple platforms, cause I know there’s like some high school students that don’t have access to Instagram, for example.

So this can become one of the only ways that they find out about things. Where did you post these? What does that look like?

Shiv Patel: So for Instagram, we focused on a wide, broad, audience. But then in the schools, when we post the posters up, we catered towards departments. So like the business poster went up with the Provo High business teacher.

So Mr. Edie, um, Mr. Norman had one of the posters and then the health science, uh, Patty Farminger, she had one of the posters. So we like catered towards departments, whereas the students actually interested in those classes are going to be, and they will see that poster.

Wendy Dau: That’s really smart because if you just post it randomly across the school, you need to have kids that are going to be interested in that particular spot.

What’d you do at Timpview?

Riley Forreston: I put them in each respective class where people would actually like, take care to look at them. Like I put some in the halls, but I also put them in like some of the business classrooms, like Mr. Johnson, Sutton, there was a lot of other ones.

Parker Rivera: So yeah, like we were saying, Riley Riley was saying about the posters, The problem with the old posters, Like, there were still posters up, but they were outdated, And the marketing team doesn’t think like we do, Because we are part of that target market, Of what we’re trying to accomplished and who were trying to attract to CAPS we’re able to think like them and say, Hey, if I see this poster in the hallway, am I going to look at it or am I just going to skip past it? So that’s what Riley specialized in was making this poster eye-popping and that students would actually engage with it because some of the outdated ones, people just walk past it, just print and copy.

And so being able to also have people market is just tough thing. It’s great that we’ll be able to be there and just know what to do and how they think of how to market to them.

Wendy Dau: And it’s helpful that you guys are like that target audience. You’re like, no, nobody’s going to look at this.

Shiv Patel: After every prototype, we, um, stood back and we’re like, would we actually read this poster if we saw it?

And that really helped to dive some problems and, you know, fix those little critiques we had.

Wendy Dau: What governs, like, what kind of content you want to put on Instagram? Like, how are you showcasing that and determining what content is really capturing people’s interest?

Shiv Patel: We went on a week-by-week basis. So, once we first started Instagram, it was very, like, engaging what CAPS is.

And then once we established that, it was more, like, trendy content. So, some of our posts were, like, TikTok trends that were happening, like, tailored towards CAPS.

Wendy Dau: Ok.

Shiv Patel: Yeah. And then we also focused on content for already existing CAP students, like how to excel at CAPS, tips and tricks on how to keep your…

Parker Rivera: So we also did content on other people’s projects, such as engineering did some awesome project for wheelchairs where they, they make costumes for all these wheelchairs. I got some phenomenal content of just the amazing job they did of making this WALL-E costume for this excited, excited little boy in his costume, and I was like, so proud of them.

Their job and their specialty is to make it, but it’s our job to get it out there for more people to know about.

Shiv Patel: All of their amazing work just stays hidden, so we wanted to become like their PR team, kind of, and have them be marketed towards the community.

Riley Forreston: I literally saw the Wall-E costume in person.

It was awesome. It was so cool. But talking more about strands, the strands actually work a lot together. I worked a lot with like the digital design people strand on how to make the poster better as well. Like the strands, even though they’re all individual, it’s like a one giant family. I’m going to exaggerate it a little bit.

That’s kind of what it is. You all work together and it’s just really cool to make the projects actually work.

Shiv Patel: What you would see in an actual company, you know, like you would see departments in an actual company also coming together and working on-

Wendy Dau: You’re not going to see it siloed like that.

Like I use our communications team to do all sorts of stuff for education in our school district, and it does a lot of the same things you guys are talking about where you’re trying to let people know about all of the great things you’re doing. Tell me what were some of the challenges you guys faced in this particular project?

Shiv Patel: I’d say starting was a big one. Because we were kind of just thrown in there blindly. We knew we wanted to make an Instagram, but we didn’t really know where we wanted to go from there. Like actually making the first post was the biggest.

Parker Rivera: I think for me personally, it was, we started making content about success alumni and past students who have actually started to exceed in the real world since taking this program.

And so we’d set up interviews with them, but then it would be like, what do we do next? We had to be the ones coming up with the deliverables. We had to be the ones with the sticky notes coming up with what we were doing. When you set up an interview, you’re like, Well, hey, I have an interview for next time, but what am I doing this time?

How am I going to be productive this time? And what do I need to do? How can I help grow our projects and our social media? So I think a lot of it is just thinking of strategies and how you can market better and always having something to do rather than just sitting and waiting for it to finish.

Wendy Dau: Well, and a lot of times in classes, the teacher tells you what to do and here you’re having to take a lot of initiative on as an individual to say, and as a team, like this is what we got to do to get to the next step. You’re not relying on somebody to lay that out for you.

What was one of the challenges, Riley?

Riley Forreston: Well, I think one of the challenges was just trying to balance fun and business. Yeah, we made a whole on like office parody skit. It was like a really funny, Shiv really enjoyed making it.

Shiv Patel: I had a lot of fun making that one.

Wendy Dau: Bene.

Riley Forreston: Loved it. It didn’t like fit our standards. And so we weren’t able to submit it. It was a little heartbreaking. Cause he spent so much time on it. It was so funny.

Shiv Patel: I realized after that I had made it, that it didn’t really fit the CAPS motto, like values that we want to teach. So we ended up scrapping it, but it was still a fun project and it helped us learn for other projects that we wanted to make.

So it was still worth it.

Wendy Dau: What would you say is a great success that you walk away from and say, wow, I really learned this and this is something I’m going to use later on.

Shiv Patel: Planning is a big one. We went from just having, you know, maybe we should do this today to like having it planned out in a sticky note.

It’s like, all right, this time we’re having this interview and then afterwards we’re editing this and getting content for this as well.

Parker Rivera: Just some of the biggest success we had is we have 30 plus sticky notes just in the finished department, which means that we did all that. But you just learn hard work.

You learn how important it is to be consistent and how, if you stop posting, you’re going to get less followers. You’re going to get less views.

Wendy Dau: Esatto.

Parker Rivera: You have to just keep pushing, you gotta keep going, and then eventually you’ll hit your goals.

Riley Forreston: Yeah, following Parker, that’s exactly how I feel. I mean, you really do just have to keep on going and moving forward.

Just always try to be motivated and try to enjoy your job and your way, or else, well, you’re just not gonna do as a good job.

Wendy Dau: That’s very true. What information would you want to share with kids that are thinking about CAPS? Like, why would you encourage them to take this? I mean, I know you’re creating a lot of content, but this is your opportunity to market as well.

So tell us a little bit about what are some of the best things about it, why they should consider it and how it’s benefiting you.

Shiv Patel: If you’re looking at paper stats, it looks great on your resume. Companies will see that you’re a, actually worked in the, in the force before, um, and they will be like excited to see how you actually have experience already, as well as just, it’s a great opportunity to get out of school and actually do something impactful.

Wendy Dau: Something that’s really quite relevant.

Parker Rivera: Yeah. Provo caps is a completely unique opportunity because like I said, CAPS exists in other places. There’s something called the CAPS network of all the different CAPS, but Provo CAPS is the only one that doesn’t stay at the school and just go in a classroom and think of it as a class.

They’re able to have the opportunity to travel to and from NuSkin. Transportation is included, so you don’t even have to worry about getting your own transportation there. I think you also learn the importance of teamwork and working as a team. And how important it is in the workplace that if you start slacking off, your whole team starts slacking off because you lead by example.

Sometimes you’re going to feel unmotivated. Sometimes you’re going to be motivated, but it’s just discipline that will keep you going.

Wendy Dau: Good. Those are great skills you guys have learned. That’s amazing. Go ahead.

Riley Forreston: I just learned that you got to try. Yeah. Just make sure to stay ahead and look at the main goal, because sometimes, I got a little sidetracked with the posters that I forgot that the whole point was to promote Provo CAPS, so just always keep the main goal in mind, you know, it’s not for the grade, it’s about succeeding in life, like, so always just look towards the main goal, and you’ll probably succeed. That’s what happened to me.

Wendy Dau: I love that. It’s more than just about the grade. It’s about figuring out how you’re going to be successful in life. That’s great. That Oh, wow. Somebody should write that down. Cause that was really good.

Shiv Patel: And naturally you’ll like hone your skills in like me personally, like I could edit videos before I started this, but just constantly doing it over and over and learning new things has made it so I’m 10 times better than I was when I first started.

Wendy Dau: Cause you practiced it.

Shiv Patel: Yep.

Parker Rivera: I think definitely a big thing for new, existing people coming, just remember to use ChatGPT before you submit anything. You submit an email, submit this thing to your client before you do anything, run it through ChatGPT, get that feedback you need.

Because ChatGPT is your best friend, and every one of you should be spending at least 30 minutes on it a day.

Shiv Patel: It’s a tool, it’s not a get out of jail free card, it’s a tool that will genuinely help you of your work if you use it. In a impactful way.

Wendy Dau: Giusto.

Riley Forreston: It’s the greatest tool ever. I might add. I love ChatGPT.

Wendy Dau: I was thinking we were talking as educators before, and I was like, why did they not have ChatGPT when I was going through graduate school and had to read like these 50 page articles? We could have run it through ChatGPT and then spent more time on the really important parts rather than…

I use chat GPT every day as well. And it’s like, I don’t think people recognize how much it just helps you in your job. It’s not doing your job for you. It’s making you better at what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Right.

Riley Forreston: Okay. Like at my school, they basically banned ChatGPT.

Wendy Dau: Well, it is, it is banned for students statewide because it violates privacy issues.

Yeah. I know we are currently vetting a particular program that is an AI program that is specific to schools so it doesn’t violate those student privacy. Mm-hmm. Issues. And that’s something that they’re looking at across the state. It’s actually called School AI.

Shiv Patel: Interesting.

Wendy Dau: And several districts have already adopted that.

So that’s what we’re looking at. So, and I’ve just had nothing but feedback about can you please get us something that we can use if, if this isn’t okay, we still need to have something because we need to learn how to use this appropriately. So it’s so timely that you guys brought that up. That’s amazing.

Shiv Patel: So might as well teach ’em how to use it in a positive way rather than just have them have to do their homework.

Wendy Dau: That’s right. Yeah. What are the most important takeaways from your project and from CAPS itself that you’re like, I’m going to use this in the next phase of my life, whether that’s in college and a job and a career, whatever that is, what is the one takeaway that you’re like, oh yeah, that was definitely something that that’s going to be so helpful.

Shiv Patel: General marketing knowledge is massive because you’re going to need that in almost all of your life. You’re going to need to market yourself to colleges. If you’re planning on doing that, you’re going to market yourself to jobs. You’re going to, if you own a business, you’re going to market your business to other people.

Like it is a massive part of the world right now. And that it’s a great skill to know.

Wendy Dau: I would agree.

Parker Rivera: Yeah. I agree with Shiv. Marketing is huge, especially in this day and age. There’s marketing agencies that need people all the time and being able to get that experience while still in high school. You could be a 16 year old, you could be a 17 year old, and you’re getting that, that experience and you’re getting ahead of the game so that when you do want that job, you have it on the resume.

Hey, I already have some marketing experience. And then look it up, like, oh wow, he’s actually legit, he knows what he’s talking about, and he’s getting ahead of the game, he’s one step ahead.

Wendy Dau: You get ahead of everybody. That’s for sure.

Riley Forreston: It’s also great college credit.

Wendy Dau: Good. Cause it offers you that concurrent enrollment credit, right?

Riley Forreston: Yep.

Wendy Dau: We could have a whole other episode about concurrent enrollment credit. It’s amazing. Right.

Shiv Patel: It is the reason why I am as far ahead as I am.

Wendy Dau: Yeah. And it does, it gives you that leg up. Like you were talking about in terms of just getting ahead of other people as you’re moving out into the career force, workforce, all of that.

So anything else that you guys want to share with us today?

Shiv Patel: Join CAPS. Follow the Instagram. That would be great for us. We have deadlines to meet. We need a quota. Uh, not actually, but it’d be great if you followed the Instagram. That’d be awesome. @ProvoCAPS.

Parker Rivera: Everyone should at least go to CAPS one time.

It’s a semester class, so I know it takes up two parts of your schedule, so it takes up two periods. It’s kind of a time commitment, but it’ll definitely be worth it, and you’ll be able to learn so much, it makes them lasting friends for the future.

Riley Forreston: Go to CAPS, it’s fun. That’s all I have to say.

Shiv Patel: Yeah, giving, I’ve given the tour to high school students about CAPS.

And giving the tour has made me see how much value there actually is in CAPS. Cause I’m pointing out things that I didn’t even think about before, but they should know about, you know?

Wendy Dau: Giusto.

Shiv Patel: And that’s really been an amazing experience to give the tour to students.

Wendy Dau: I think one of the other things you also brought up is an important skill for kids.

And I don’t know that schools do a very good job of teaching this, but you talked about doing your skit of the office and how you recognize that that wasn’t going to work. It’s okay for something not to work out. Like you don’t have to be perfect at everything, right? Not everything you do is going to be 100 percent awesome.

And that is really important for us to realize.

Shiv Patel: Yeah. You learn from it. You realize it didn’t stick and you take what you learned from it and use it to apply to everything else you do in life. That’s right.

Parker Rivera: I think definitely in CAPS, if you don’t have a massive project backlog of things you want to get done, even if it doesn’t ever get done, at least you have something you’re doing and you’re not just sitting there waiting for someone else to do it. As long as you have that plan of things that you can do in the future. Which, what we call it is a project backlog of all the things we want to try to get done. And everyday you’re adding to it, you’re like, oh hey we need to do this, hey we need to do this.

How are we going to do this? The next people can take over. But being able to have those plans just gets you ahead of the game and you’re always moving forward and you’re never just flatlining.

Wendy Dau: That’s awesome. That’s great.

Riley Forreston: One other thing is like to make sure to be like, actually nice to your coworker.

Yeah.

Wendy Dau: That is a good skill, isn’t it?

Riley Forreston: Yeah. It’s good for networking. Like if you just open yourself up to your teammates, then you’ll enjoy it a lot. I mean, Shiv and Parker, they’ve been really fun to work with.

Shiv Patel: Thanks Riley. You too.

Riley Forreston: I hope I’m fun.

Wendy Dau: It helps you to develop those relationships and our, and employers tell us all the time, they need people who can work together, who can collaborate, who can get along with one another.

This seems like a great opportunity for kids to actually really practice that in a, in a real-world setting. Yeah.

Shiv Patel: And the thing is that, like, it’s always changing. Jan, the director, the instructors are always coming up with new ideas to make CAPS better. Um, next semester, I’ve heard, like, they’re doing entrepreneurship a little bit more.

Like, they’re giving kids a space to work on their own business. That would be fantastic.

Parker Rivera: I think, yeah, having that space is huge. Because in our day and age, So much people are addicted to their phones. And the moment someone sits down, they’re just constantly scrolling. You sit down, you’re going to pull out your phone.

Hey, I’ll just sit here for 10 minutes. And the next thing you know, it’s been two hours being able to put that away and knowing when to stop and to actually be productive is just huge.

Wendy Dau: Well, listen, I want to thank you guys for coming on our show today and telling us a little bit about CAPS. It’s been awesome.

Shiv Patel: Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. This has been a great opportunity.

Wendy Dau: This is awesome. It’s been super fun. And it’s fun to hear about your great work. So great job, you guys. so much.

Thank you everyone for joining me for this week’s episode of What’s Up with the Sup’. As always, all episodes will be posted on the district website, YouTube, and anywhere you get your podcasts.

If you have any topics or questions you would like us to discuss on the podcast, please email us at podcast@provo.edu. Don’t forget to join us again next week when we are back with an all-new episode of What’s Up With the Sup’. Have a great weekend.