Hands-On Experiences Inspire the Next Generation

By Katie Luckett, Manager of Marketing, Communications and Education

Choptank Electric Cooperative participates in many youth engagement activities throughout our community to educate and inspire our future leaders. During these events we teach electrical and power line safety, careers in the utility industry, how power gets to homes, and provide hands-on interactions and demonstrations.

“Educating the children in our local community is one of the most important aspects of an electric cooperative,” says Mike Malandro, President and CEO of Choptank Electric Cooperative. “Making sure our students know how to remain safe during an outage at home or around power lines outside is not only valuable, but lifesaving.”

One of the largest youth engagement events we attend each year is the Junior Achievement Inspire Career Fair at the Wicomico Civic Center. We spend two days interacting with over 4,000 eighth grade students from across the Eastern Shore of Maryland, demonstrating how to close a switch at the top of a pole with a hot-stick, and a tabletop glove challenge. Both demonstrations provide middle school students with real-life experience of being a lineworker for Choptank Electric. They get to put on our gloves and safety glasses, open and close switches with our hot stick, and race their peers in removing and adding bolts to a tabletop utility pole.

We added a Choptank Fiber display to this event in 2024 to showcase fiber-optic cables and the process of installing broadband internet to homes. This opened the conversation with students about careers in the fiber and IT fields, which is a rapidly growing industry here in Maryland, especially in our rural areas.

Our participation with Junior Achievement of the Eastern Shore continues with our electric utility storefront in the new Perdue Henson Junior Achievement Center in Salisbury (refer to the January 2024 edition for more details on the opening of the Center). We held a Choptank Electric Cooperative Takeover Day on March 25, when we supplied the entire Center with our staff to volunteer leading each storefront for a group of Colonel Richardson Middle School students to participate in the Biztown program.

In addition to these events, we also host students of all ages at our district buildings for tours, visit schools for career days/fairs, speak to trade schools and tech classes about the lineworker industry, and take bucket trucks and our hot-line demonstration out to show kids what happens when things come in contact with power lines. We are looking forward to bringing five high school students to Washington, D.C., this summer for Youth Tour, where they will learn about electric cooperatives and how our national trade organization, NRECA, works to protect our industry and mission.

Concern for Community and Education, Training and Information are two of the Seven Cooperative Principles that we follow; both of which are modeled by our youth outreach efforts daily. We realize that the future of our community and industry lies within our students and the next generation, so we are investing resources to keep them safe, educated and inspired here on the Eastern Shore.