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Home - Contacts - Collaborators
Education and Training
Ensuring access to high-quality education and training that lead to living wage jobs is critical to women's economic security. In Maine, as in other states, statistics continue to point out the direct relationship between education, increased skill levels and income. Yet, Maine people, and women in particular, continue to face significant challenges in accessing and succeeding in quality adult and postsecondary education and workforce development opportunities which lead to a more secure future.
It is vital that there be a continuum of formal and informal life-long learning opportunities that foster and support women seeking educational upgrading in preparation for employment and in advancing within the workplace, including access to high-skill, high-wage occupations.
The Issues
- Post-Secondary Education, Student Support Services and Financial Aid
- Workforce Development and Training
- Adult Education
- Assessment, Career Planning and Case Management
- Non-Traditional Occupations, Gender Stereotyping and Affirmative Action
Priority Recommendations
Post-Secondary Education
- Assure that women and other at-risk populations have access to culturally responsive counseling and placement services that are appropriate to their interests, abilities and preparation.
- Require that federal programs, including TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), WIA (Workforce Investment Act) and the Perkins Act, provide funding for successful programs and services that assist low-income women to enter and successfully complete post-secondary education. Use Maine's Parents as Scholars program as a model for this approach within TANF.
- Increase availability of financial aid for students pursuing post-secondary education; specifically, restore Pell Grant funding at least to 1980's levels, adjusted for inflation.
Workforce Development and Training
- Set training as the principal priority of WIA. Streamline the WIA service structure to ensure that women and at-risk populations can immediately access the full range of services, especially skills training and education, that they need in order to achieve economic self-sufficiency.
- Set attainment of economic self-sufficiency as the principal priority of TANF workforce development programs. Accordingly, provide for greater opportunities for participants to pursue long-term education and/or training that will lead to a job with self-sufficiency wages.
- Restore the gender equity program requirements and funding set-asides from the previous Perkins Act.
- Require workforce development and training systems to fund the full range of services necessary to address the particular needs of displaced homemakers, and to assist women to pursue non-traditional jobs.
- Increase representation of women's community-based education and training providers on state-supported/ publicly funded initiatives, including the State Jobs Council, Local Workforce Investment Boards, and MDOL's Rapid Employment and Training Initiative (RETI) (Maine's rapid response teams for worker dislocation).
- Continue state support for Quality Center and Governor's Training Initiatives. Include assurances for women's equal access.
Adult Education
- Expand the availability of adult education services in rural areas. Ensure provision of a core level of services in all school districts.
- Fully utilize the Adult Education System, in collaboration with other community-based women's education and training organizations, to act as a feeder system/connection program to increase access to and readiness for success in post-secondary education.
- Continue the Maine policy of allowing the use of federal Perkins Act funding for adult education programs providing preparation for vocational enrollment, and for specific vocational programming offered by adult education programs.
- Ensure high-quality adult education services, including ESOL and preparation for higher education and employment, for Maine's increasing immigrant population, with particular focus on women who are heads of households.
- Increase the level of childcare and transportation services available through Maine adult education programs; include these services in the state subsidy formula.
Assessment, Career Planning and Case Management
- Require Maine CareerCenters to partner with community-based organizations to ensure that comprehensive career planning specific to women's needs is being offered and to ensure that non-traditional fields of employment are being encouraged and supported for women.
- Require that all TANF recipients have access to comprehensive career planning with follow-up services, on a long-term basis, to allow them to target and seek out careers that are satisfying and pay a living wage.
- Require post-secondary institutions to provide a harassment-free learning environment in which women can pursue education in technical, science, engineering and other non-traditional career tracks. Strongly enforce such requirements.
- Require that all state and federally funded career counseling provide all women and girls with exposure to and information on non-traditional occupations and additional services needed to assist women in pursuing these occupations.
Non-Traditional Occupations, Gender Stereotyping and Affirmative Action
- Require an affirmative action plan, compete with goals and timetables for employment of women, minorities and minority women on all state-funded construction projects.
- Provide a full-time gender equity coordinator, with a budget, at each of Maine's technical colleges and at the Maine Department of Education.
- Set goals for admission of women in the state's vocational high school and technical colleges, with appropriate and effective programming to support attainment of the goals.
- Set goals for women entering nontraditional occupations in all employment and training programs funded by or through Maine's Department of Labor and Department of Human Services. Provide financial incentives for programs to attain the goals.
- Require effective services to expose high school girls to trade and technical careers, and to encourage and support them in pursuing those careers.
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