Portland Public School’s Career Pathways Manager Honored

BEND – Jeanne Yerkovich, Career Pathways Program Manager for Portland Public Schools, received the Nancy Hargis Award for Leadership in Career Development for 2012 during the Oregon Association for Career and Technical Educators annual conference.  First awarded in 1990, the Oregon Career Information System (CIS) Board selects a recipient from a list of nominees each year. Cheryl Buhl, Director of CIS, presented the award.

In presenting the award, Ms. Buhl stated that “this year’s recipient of the Nancy Hargis Award is a fearless advocate for career services for all students and a visionary.”  Prior to her work with Portland Public Schools, Jeanne Yerkovich was the School-to-Work Coordinator at David Douglas High School during massive school redesign efforts in the 1990’s. In both that position and her current job, she has been instrumental in designing strategies and tools to address the state’s career-related learning requirements and worked tirelessly with district faculty, staff, and administrators in implementation. She also actively promoted and supported efforts as part of regional leadership groups and in concert with state agencies. 

Jeanne celebrating her award with Diane Parham and Cheryl Buhl

Her most ambitious work has involved the development of the Pathways Program which included an online Personal Education Plan (PEP) that pulled together student records and CIS information into an individualized guidance and planning tool.  The work that was involved in its development has had far-reaching impact on internal policies and external tools. In particular, in creating a customized CIS as part of this work, it provided Web Services capacity for all CIS consortium members, influenced the redesign of CIS My Plan, and encouraged other school districts to customize CIS. She served on the CIS Board from 2005 through 2011.

The Nancy Hargis Award serves to recognize people and organizations in the fields of education and workforce development whose contributions are making a difference in the career decision-making and preparation of Oregonians. The award is named after Nancy Hargis, retired School-to-Work Program Coordinator for the Oregon Department of Education. The Oregon CIS Board selected Jeanne Yerkovich in recognition of creativity, commitment, leadership, and collaboration in developing career development programs to support meaningful career and educational planning and for the integration of the CIS in that work.