“Aspire Gorham is like an umbrella over the Extended Learning Opportunities (ELO) Program, and the ELO program is the culmination of Aspire Gorham,” said Eliza Kenigsburg, the director of the Extended Learning Opportunity (ELO) Program at Gorham High School. Kenigsberg explained the Aspire Gorham initiative that follows Gorham students from prekindergarten through high school and distinguished the ELO Program as the final step along the way to career exploration.
Beginning in the fall of 2020, the program has allowed students to explore their career interests, in whatever field they choose, while also earning credit for it. When students demonstrated significant interest in the program and the opportunities it provided, GHS applied for a grant offered by the Maine Department of Education to hire someone whose full-time job would be to oversee these students. The first ELO instructor was hired in 2022, and today the seat is filled by Michelle Bourget, who oversees over 75 students partaking in the program.
The ELO program was recently represented by Bourget and Kenigsberg, along with a few students participating in the program, at Gorham’s Business Roundtable on March 18. Several Gorham businesses were presented with the program’s outline, as well as anecdotes that the students shared, in a discussion about the impact of the program on Gorham students in relation to local businesses.
“We have students doing the ELOs in teaching, in counseling, in social work, in veterinary medicine, and all aspects of the medical field. The list goes on and on,” Kenigsberg explains. The program, in addition to providing students hands-on exposure and experience, emphasizes students finding their own ELOs through networking and reaching out to mentors who work in their desired field.
Strengthening each student’s ability, as Kenigsburg put it, “to be asked to figure out what you want to pursue and then to take steps to pursue it; that’s a big psychological leap for a lot of students, and I think it sometimes makes the transition out of high school feel a little bit less rocky.”
The life-skills-based curriculum creates a program that allows students to explore many career fields or, if they choose, take on a long-term project. “There’s so many different aspects to leading a good life and one of them is your career,” Kenigsburg states. The ELO program at Gorham High School allows students to pursue their interests and hone their skills to prepare them for life and a career after high school.