Education & Workforce
Where the Retraining Lands
FlyForward is a workforce-education problem before it is anything else. The district and the college are where the retraining actually has to be built, accredited, and delivered — and these are the two leaders who decide whether it survives that journey.
Dr. Raymond Okafor
Assistant Superintendent for Career & Technical Education · Santa Noeta Unified School District
Dr. Okafor oversees the CTE pathways that would feed high-school students toward the airport’s new green-energy and automated-logistics roles. Nothing reaches those students without going through his office, and he is in no hurry. He has watched a dozen “transformational partnerships” arrive with a flourish and evaporate within two years, leaving his teachers with abandoned curriculum and a little less trust each time. So he asks for board approval, articulation agreements, and proof of durability before he will ask his people to change everything again. His caution is earned, and he is frequently right that a program built without a credentialed teacher to deliver it is not a program at all.
“I love the vision. Now walk me through who’s teaching it third period — and whether they’re credentialed to.”
Dr. Priya Raman
Dean of Workforce & Economic Development · Santa Noeta College
Dean Raman owns workforce programming at Santa Noeta College — the certificates, the non-credit-to-credit ladders, the employer partnerships that would move workers into the airport’s new roles. SNC is FlyForward’s training engine, and Raman wants to move fast. What slows her is not ambition but her own institution: curriculum committees, accreditation cycles, faculty agreements, and state funding formulas that still reward seat-time over outcomes. She is a reformer fighting her own house’s inertia, fluent in both employer-speak and academic governance, and clear-eyed that a beautifully designed program dies if it cannot clear the committee that has to approve it.
“Don’t design me the perfect course. Design me the one that survives our curriculum committee — and still works.”