The CTE Program Answering the Question ‘Why Do I Need Math to Be a Firefighter?’

Students filtering into Aubrey Graeve’s English classroom leave their water bottles at a table in the back, grab their workbooks from the bookshelf, and then head to their assigned seats and log on to their Chromebooks.

It’s a Tuesday morning in the last week of September. Today, first-year students (mostly juniors) in the fire-science, emergency medical technician, and criminal-justice programs at Cass Career Center

are learning how to craft their resumes—a writing lesson that is aligned to their career aspirations.

“The resume is a precision instrument,” Graeve says at the front of the classroom. “Precision on paper equals precision on the job. Water pressure [when fighting fires] matters; exact details on a crime report matter. It’s the same thing here.”

Graeve flips through slides describing how to format resumes, what type of information should be included, and how to present skills on the page. Every now and then, she stops to ask the fire-science and criminal-justice program teachers to talk about what their industries look for in a resume.

In the classroom next door, Lisa Elifrits is teaching second-year students in the same programs “adulting math,” as she calls it: all about credit cards.

“We’re setting you up to think about when you walk out of these doors in May,” Elifrits tells the class of seniors “We’re going to be setting up a budget. Next time we’re together, we’re going to be spending that budget.”

Elifrits gives students a sample credit card statement and a worksheet that asks them to figure out monthly interest rates and new balances. She runs through the equation and then asks the students to fill out the worksheet on their own or with a partner.

“After six months, you’ve paid off how much? $16,” she says after a few minutes of the financial-literacy lesson. Then she shows the students how much extra they paid the bank in interest and leaves them with this lesson: “Always pay more than the minimum balance.”

Graeve’s English class and Elifrits’ math class make up Cass Career Center’s integrated academics program, which incorporates real-world communication and math skills into students’ program of study to prepare them for postsecondary training, college, and careers.

Learning how to write for specific careers and master practical math

Cass Career Center is located about 40 miles south of downtown Kansas City, Mo. It offers 10 career programs and serves 569 high school students, mostly juniors and seniors, who are bused in from 12 schools in Cass County and some neighboring counties. (It also offers adult education classes.)

Generally, the school enrolls about 520 to 550 students a year, said Anne Hickman, the director of the center. Seats are strictly limited because of lab capacity, equipment availability, and safety ratios, making admission competitive when applications exceed available spots, she said.

Many K-12 districts across the country are expanding their work-based learning and career and technical education programs to meet the rising student demand

for opportunities to explore and engage with a broad range of post-high school pathways. A majority of educators (61%) said their district’s CTE offerings have increased in the last five years, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey conducted last year

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Most educators say the overall quality of their CTE offerings is good but still see room for improvement, according to the survey. When asked to assign a letter grade to their CTE programs, nearly half of them gave their CTE programs a B. Some of the challenges cited by educators who gave their programs a B or lower included lack of funding for facilities and equipment, inadequate amount of space, not enough teachers, and a lack of rigor.

For Cass Career Center, having dedicated integrated math and English teachers is one way to improve the quality of the CTE programs they offer, Hickman said.

The school started offering embedded credits for English and math in 2006, a year after Missouri changed graduation requirements

to include a fourth credit in English. (An embedded credit course

incorporates competencies from one subject into another subject and allows students to earn credit for both.)

At the time, certified English and math instructors graded work students completed in their CTE classes for academic credit, but CTE teachers were the ones teaching those lessons, Hickman said.

But by 2008, Cass Career Center had two full-time integrated academics teachers—one for math, another for English—who worked closely with the CTE teachers to connect academic standards to what students were learning in their programs, Hickman said.

The integrated English class teaches technical reading and writing, work readiness (such as resume and job interview preparation), research, and professional written and oral communication—all of which meet the state’s English learning standards for juniors and seniors. In integrated math, students learn a mix of skills from the state’s math learning standards for secondary students, about personal finance, and industry-specific math.

The students spend three hours at Cass Career Center every school day. They attend integrated math and English classes once every other week. Otherwise, they are in their CTE program classes, where the academic teachers sometimes come in to reinforce math and English skills.

The biggest benefit of integrated academics is relevance and direct real-world application, according to Cass Career Center educators. Students are able to see why math and English matter because they then apply those skills in their career programs.

For instance, criminal-justice students learned the difference between subjective and objective descriptions when they had to write up a report based on a mock crime scene in front of them. At first, they would describe the scene as “messy,” but Graeve taught them that’s a subjective word and asked them to describe exactly what they see: There’s pizza on the floor. There are beer bottles knocked over.

Health-services students apply geometry skills during their phlebotomy lesson. Using the correct needle angle helps phlebotomists enter the vein safely, collect the blood successfully, and reduce discomfort for the patient. With floatable pool “noodles” used as fake arms, sticks, and protractors, the students practice drawing blood, ensuring their sticks are angled between 15 and 30 degrees into the noodle. They do that multiple times to build consistency, Elifrits said.

At a time when schools across the country are grappling with student achievement declines, chronic absenteeism, and disengagement, it’s even more important to make sure what students are learning is relevant to their lives, experts say.

Research shows that students in classrooms where the teacher integrates math instruction into CTE learning perform significantly better on standardized math tests and college math-placement tests than students who received regular CTE curriculum without the enhanced math instruction, said James Stone, the director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education

. Students also improved their math skills without losing the technical skills needed for future jobs, he said.

Stone isn’t aware of any research on having specific, dedicated integrated math and English teachers in CTE programs, but it seems like “a viable model,” he said, based on a reporter’s description of the program.

“Anything we can do to help kids grasp the math that’s needed in the workplace is worth doing,” he said. “I don’t know how many places use [the same model that Cass Career Center is doing], but I know it’s used, and it certainly has merit.”

Cass Career Center students are typically believers in the integrated academics approach, based on interviews with them.

“We really learn stuff that we want to go into, rather than—for lack of a better term—wasting our time on stuff that we’re not really going to use,” said Skyla Allen, a senior in the criminal-justice program. “Doing math or English based on what I want to do with my future makes it seem more interesting to me. I feel really involved and doing what I enjoy, rather than feeling like I’m just there because it’s something I have to do to graduate.”

Donovan Richter was enrolled in the automotive-technology program at Cass Career Center and graduated in 2025. Richter now works at Foley Equipment, which sells construction tools, and said he uses the math and English skills he learned at Cass Career Center daily.

“We have to calculate labor hours, give quotes to customers,” Richter said. “We have to communicate to customers and write up a report on every single job we did.”

The integrated academics program “is a lot more than just for careers,” he said. “It also helps you with life.”

Putting math skills to work in learning how to fight a fire

Back in Graeve’s classroom, the second-year students in the fire-science, emergency medical technician, and criminal-justice programs are finishing their cover letters, updating resumes they created last school year, and starting to write requests for recommendation letters.

While the students work, Chandra Kelly, the criminal-justice program teacher, asks Graeve if she can come to the criminal-justice class next week and talk about the interview process. The students are getting ready for a panel interview with a few police chiefs, state troopers, and fire chiefs in the area. For second-year students, the results of the interview determine their professional career ranks and positions in the class, similar to the ranks of captains, lieutenants, and sergeants in police departments.

“I’ll go in and talk to them a little bit about handshakes and eye contact and all that kind of stuff,” Graeve said in an interview.

The in-class conversation between Graeve and Kelly is one example of the collaboration that happens “all the time” at Cass Career Center, Graeve said.

It’s a lot like a co-teaching model, according to Graeve and Elifrits. While they’re experts in English and math, the CTE teachers are experts in their fields. It’s helpful to have both subject-matter experts in the room because it underscores the relevance of what students are learning, Graeve and Elifrits said.

One time, Elifrits gave the fire-science students a math equation to guide them in how to fight a fire, but if they had followed the equation, they would have “collapsed a building in a fire,” she said.

When operating a fire pump, firefighters have many factors to take into account, like the length and diameter of the hose and the water flow rate. Elifrits’ math problem involved using a hose that was too large and a nozzle that delivered too much water in a given amount of time.

Bill Shaumeyer, the fire-science teacher, was in the room, saw the math problem, and asked the students if they saw anything wrong with what the equation suggested for fighting the fire. The students said it seemed like way too much water, which would put the building in jeopardy of collapsing.

Elifrits had to change up the math equation on the spot, but Shaumeyer asked to keep it on the worksheet for future students. “‘That’ll be a great conversation to have,’” Elifrits recalled him saying.

“I wouldn’t have known if he wasn’t in there with me,” she said.

While having dedicated integrated math and English teachers could be costly given teacher shortages across the country, Cass Career Center educators said it wouldn’t work as well otherwise.

“We team-teach,” Graeve said. “I am the English teacher, but I’m the fire English teacher. Bill [Shaumeyer] and I are doing it together. That collaboration has to happen in the room, in the moment.”

Building up the integrated academics program was also a big, complex collaboration, according to Nichole Tews, who was the first integrated English teacher at Cass Career Center and is now its assistant director.

Creating the integrated English program “was equally exciting and frustrating,” she said.

There was no framework, no guidelines, no textbook, Tews said. Instead, she had to work with each CTE program instructor to figure out what communication skills are needed in that industry and align that with 12th grade state standards for English/language arts. Those standards include reading informational text, writing, speaking, and listening, Tews said. All she had to do when creating the curriculum was make sure those standards were authentic to each program’s industry.

“If their industry is not asking them to write a five-paragraph essay, then that’s not what I should be preparing them to do,” Tews said. “If their industry is asking them to write professional emails or make presentations to their staff, those are the skills they need.”

Over the years, the CTE instructors and the integrated academics teachers have worked together to update the programs as industry standards change, Cass Career Center educators said.

For instance, in English class, Graeve saw that many industries now want to see skills first on a resume instead of education. To address that demand, she talked to the program instructors to hear what they thought and then she updated the resume template that she teaches the students. Some teachers have also recommended doing more technical reading, such as for welding-procedure sheets.

Shaumeyer, who has taught fire science at Cass Career Center for 10 years, said that when he first started, the math curriculum included reading topographical maps for hazmat spills. However, in his industry experience, he’s never once pulled out a topographical map to assess hazmat spills. He reached out to the math instructor at the time and recommended going through basic pump operations for firefighters instead.

With pump operations, students apply whole-number and decimal operations, unit conversions, ratios, rates, and formulas to solve multistep problems, Elifrits said. Students learn to read and interpret pump gauges, pressure charts, and flow data to calculate water flow, friction loss, and pump-discharge pressure. They also use estimation and mathematical reasoning to evaluate the accuracy and reasonableness of their calculations in real-world firefighting scenarios.

“Since then, that has been the focus [of the fire science math],” Shaumeyer said.

And it’s paid off, he said. Fire departments in the area that have hired Cass Career Center students have told him how impressed they are with the students’ knowledge of pump operations.

Integrating academics into career and technical education comes with challenges

Running the integrated academics program at Cass Career Center hasn’t been without its challenges, educators said.

For Graeve and Elifrits, the biggest challenge is time. They see all students but only for a limited amount of time. Then, they also need to tailor lessons to 10 CTE programs. In the first quarter of the school year, every program usually gets the same lessons, but after that, lessons become more aligned to the career track students are in.

“It takes a lot of work, but I know the reason why they need a different lesson,” Elifrits said. “It is time-consuming to make it engaging, relevant, and purposeful.”

The upside, they said, is that they have a good chunk of planning time built into their schedule. Plus, on the days when they don’t have students in their classes, they can pop into the different programs and help reinforce the academic skills they’re teaching.

Getting the sending schools to count the center’s English and math credits toward students’ graduation requirements was challenging at first, Tews said. The schools didn’t trust that the English and math classes students would take at the center would be as rigorous as the ones they would receive at their schools. It took a lot of presentations and bringing in superintendents to the school to see what the program looks like to get them to sign off on those academic requirements, she said.

Student buy-in to the academic learning can sometimes be a challenge, too, Hickman said. At first, some students don’t understand why they still have to take English and math at Cass Career Center—until they realize that what they learn is something they can apply in their future careers.

Skyla, the senior student in the criminal-justice program, plans to go to college to pursue a degree in criminal justice, she said. She wants to join the Air Force, like her father and grandfather, or go into law enforcement “to help make a better impact on the world,” she said.

“I feel like that’s just something that I have always wanted to do,” Skyla said. Starting the criminal-justice program at Cass has made pursuing that dream “a lot easier.”

“It’s cleared my eyes up more about the path I want to take,” she added.