By Allison Detloff, Staff Writer — Job Training Coordination is making soup! Students involved in JTC, or Job Training Coordination, have a multitude of projects that help them to learn real life skills, ranging from making soup to volunteering at local businesses.

The project they are currently working on is their ‘Winter Soup Fridays’. Students make homemade soup in January and February for teachers that have signed up for the service.

“You make the decisions, we will do the work,” teacher Bambi Fritsche’s soup order form said.

During the course of the soup project, students learn skills that they will be able to use in their everyday lives.

“They learn marketing skills, profit and loss analysis, communication skills and organization,” Fritsche said.

Along with their soup project, students decided to make and sell wax pinecone fire starters for Thanksgiving to help them learn new skills and make money for their class.

“The proceeds go back to the career tech, field trips, lunches and the DECA competition,” Fritsche said.

DECA, or Distributive Education Clubs of America, has a competition for students thinking about going into the fields of business and administration, marketing, hospitality and tourism, finance and entrepreneurship. DECA helps high school and college students from all over the world to prepare them for careers in these fields. Over 200,000 students from 3,500 school participate in the competition geared toward student’s learning styles and interests.

JTC will be competing against other schools from across Ohio in April.

On top of projects and preparing for the DECA competition, JTC students also volunteer at places such as the Mckinley Museum and Mercy Medical Center.

Students volunteer at Mercy Medical attended classes at the beginning of the year that taught them about the hospital and rules they must follow. They are currently on their second job rotation where they acquire a new set of skills that will help them in the future occupation of their choice.

JTC is the first group that the McKinley Museum has ever asked to volunteer on a regular basis. Students clean different places around the museum while learning about the exhibits.

Through making soup and the array of other project JTC does, preparing for the DECA competition and volunteering around the community, students learning skills that they can use throughout their lives, even after high school.

[Updated Aug. 10, 2017: This article has been reformatted for consistency.]