Then & Now: Worcester Industrial Technical Institute, 26 Salisbury St., Worcester
And for those who roamed the halls, perhaps the prefered reference is WITI.
Opened in 1960, the post-secondary career training school at the time was called by the Worcester school district’s vocational education head “the first completely technical institute in the state.”
Students there, who were high school graduates from all across the state, learned trades like metal technology, data processing, and machine and tool drafting, before being scooped up by eager employers in the region, as the Telegram & Gazette put it back then.
The program was extremely popular at one point. In 1963, for example, the district had to turn away 300 applicants due to a lack of space, which is not unlike the situation today at Worcester Technical High School, the city’s remaining career training school that routinely has a waiting list.
Worcester schools distributing science kits to homebound students
WORCESTER – The district this week will begin distributing thousands of science kits to elementary schools across the city, as part of a new drive to enable students to do more hands-on, experiment-based work.
In all, the School Department expects to give out 11,675 kits to students in prekindergarten through sixth grade over the next two weeks, which school staff assembled with about $70,000 in Title IV federal funding received by the district.
The initiative is the largest-scale effort to get actual school materials into the hands of kids since the district distributed work packets to students shortly after closing schools at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic last March.
School Committee OK s emergency admissions policy for Worcester Tech high school
WORCESTER – The School Committee this week approved new emergency admissions guidelines for Worcester Technical High School to account for the effects of COVID-19 this school year, with a more long-term update to admissions standards coming down the line.
Worcester Tech, the district’s popular vocational school, typically has a waitlist of several hundred students each year. But even though state records showed the school enrolled 1,481 students this past fall, a new high, Principal Siobhan Petrella told the committee this the district’s decision to have all schools do remote learning to start the school year reduced the allure to some families.