Why Alabama's Workforce Development Begins Long Before Students Apply for a Job

Cody Carlton
Aug 18
7 min read

Margaret Morton on Afterschool, EARTH, and why workforce development is really about building human capacity.

Ask someone what workforce development means, and the conversation almost always goes the same direction: job training, career pathways, credentials, whether a graduating class is ready for the workplace.

Margaret Morton hears that conversation often. She just doesn't think it starts early enough.

"Workforce development is building human capacity," she said. "So when does that start?"

For Morton, Executive Director and CEO of the Sylacauga Alliance for Family Enhancement, known across East Alabama as SAFE, the answer isn't complicated. It starts long before a young person applies for a job. In many cases, it starts before that child is born.

It grows in the years when a young person is learning to work with someone who sees a problem differently, to try something that doesn't work and figure out why, to take responsibility for a piece of a group project, and to discover, slowly, that they have something worth contributing.

Nobody calls that workforce development at the time. But it's the foundation the workforce depends on.

Why SAFE Saw Afterschool Differently

Morton has led SAFE for almost three decades, but her path started in a classroom. She taught school, then moved into special education and school counseling, and along the way she wrote a graduate thesis about a multidisciplinary center where children with special needs could walk through "no wrong door" and find every service they needed in one place.

The center she pictured never got built the way she imagined it. The philosophy behind it did.

"You've got to have a coordinated system of support," Morton said, "or there are too many that fall through the cracks and don't have opportunities."

That belief is what became SAFE. Sylacauga's schools looked successful on paper, but the people working closest to families could still see children falling through the cracks. So community leaders convened across education, business, healthcare, government, and local congregations, and asked for something harder to give than money.

"This is about your time," Morton remembers telling them. "Would you give your time for us to investigate how we collectively, as a community, could move together?"

That question is still the one SAFE tries to answer, and it's what eventually led SAFE into Afterschool work. Learning doesn't stop when the school bell rings, and Morton says the hours right after it represent either the greatest opportunity or the greatest risk.

SAFE's first Afterschool program, called Bridges, now Expanding Learning Possibilities, started with five children meeting at First Baptist Church in Sylacauga. It brought together students from two different school districts in one program for the first time in the state, a detail that mattered because it meant a child wasn't left out simply because of which side of a district line they lived on. Nearly three decades later, that program has grown to close to twenty sites across six school systems in East Alabama.

"Our programs have become much more than just tutoring," Morton said. "They're places where students discover passions, develop confidence, build relationships with caring adults, and begin imagining futures they may have never considered before."

Two Workforce Roles of Afterschool

Morton's argument has a practical, present-tense half as well as a long-term one, and it's worth separating them.

Afterschool supports today's workforce because parents can stay at work when their children have somewhere safe and meaningful to be. Businesses need employees who can show up, and a parent can't stay at a job with no safe place for their child once school lets out. Alabama families report significant unmet demand for Afterschool programs and strong public support for funding them, according to the Afterschool Alliance, which makes a reliable program less of a convenience and more like infrastructure a local economy runs on.

Afterschool also builds tomorrow's workforce, because those hours are where kids first practice collaboration, communication, responsibility, and problem-solving: the same qualities employers say they need years later. Afterschool is doing two jobs in workforce development at once. It helps today's employees stay in the workforce, and it gives tomorrow's employees a place to begin building the skills they'll eventually bring into it.

What Workforce Readiness Looks Like at Ten Years Old

Workforce readiness for an elementary or middle school student doesn't look like job training. It looks like learning to work with someone who has a different idea than you do. It looks like trying a solution, watching it fail, figuring out why, and trying again anyway.

That's why SAFE builds its Afterschool programming around project-based learning and STEM.

"STEM is everything we do," she said. "Whether you're hammering a nail or creating an innovation to fly to Mars, that's the engineering design process. We don't go to the STEM lab on Friday. Everything we do is predicated on those strategies."

In practice, that means students are collaborating, solving real problems, building things, and sometimes failing at it in front of each other.

"It's okay to fail," Morton said. "How do we learn? We learn from the mistakes we make, particularly if we've learned how to work together to solve those problems."

Ask an employer what they actually need in a new hire, and the list rarely starts with a technical certification. The National Association of Colleges and Employers names teamwork and professionalism, being accountable to a group and dependable in the work, among the competencies employers consistently look for. Those habits don't appear the day someone turns eighteen. They get built over years, and Afterschool gives kids another place to practice them.

Talladega County Schools has built much of its instructional approach around this idea districtwide, and the results show up in more than test scores. At Winterboro High School, the graduation rate climbed from 61 percent to 100 percent over roughly a decade of project-based learning, according to PBLWorks. Morton counts the district as one of SAFE's most important partners in bringing that same instructional culture into Afterschool programming.

When Opportunity Changes a Trajectory

Morton remembers a young girl who came to Bridges after her older brother, who had been watching her after school while their mother worked, was killed in a car accident. Her mother brought her in because there was nowhere else for her to go.

At first, the girl sat off by herself. "She cowered over in a corner," Morton said. "She was not interactive with the other children."

Then she found golf, through SAFE's partnership with First Tee, which uses golf to help young people develop life skills through the game. Something in her opened up.

"Golf became her outlet," Morton said. "And she was talented at it."

She earned a four-year college scholarship and eventually transferred back to Alabama. First Tee invited her to an international symposium, where she stood on a stage and introduced General Colin Powell in front of hundreds of people, the same girl who had once been too afraid to talk to the kids sitting next to her.

"She would tell you," Morton said, "that being in the Afterschool program and having the opportunities she had totally changed the trajectory of her life."

It Takes an Ecosystem

Morton is careful not to let SAFE's work sound like it's only about kids. People, she says, don't divide neatly into categories. A parent is also an employee. A student pursuing a credential may also need transportation or childcare to get there.

"We are an ecosystem within ourselves," she said.

That belief is why SAFE pairs education and Afterschool work with family support, transportation, and adult workforce training, and why Morton pushes back on the idea that this kind of support is a giveaway. "That label that we put on people, saying they're nothing more than a handout, that isn't true," she said. Dollars from programs like TANF and SNAP Education and Training resources go toward things like adult education, transportation, and workforce credentialing at SAFE: investments in getting somewhere, not substitutes for the work of getting there.

From SAFE to EARTH

Morton describes the East Alabama Rural Innovation and Training Hub, known as EARTH, as an outgrowth of everything SAFE has built over almost three decades.

"It's not about buildings," she said. "It's about people."

EARTH is under construction on the site of the old Avondale Mills complex in Sylacauga. When it opens, students from five surrounding school districts will take their four core academic subjects on campus, then move into a career pathway such as welding, cybersecurity, aviation, or healthcare before returning to their home school to graduate with their own class. Adults will have the same access, alongside a small-business incubator and a regenerative agriculture space with a farm-to-table cafe.

The point isn't the full list of what's being built. It's that students won't just hear about career possibilities. They'll be able to encounter them, learn alongside working professionals, and explore pathways connected to real opportunities in their own region.Over $34 million has been invested to develop a 32 acre campus on the former Avondale Mills Site. EARTH projects the campus will serve roughly 11,000 people a year when fully operational, according to reporting on the project's financing.

"It's opportunities for today," Morton said. "And it's opportunities for tomorrow."

What Leaders Can Do

Morton’s argument is not that every business needs to start an Afterschool program. It is that each part of a community has something it can contribute.

Morton's vision reaches past any single program or campus. She's asking education, business, and community leaders to treat investment in young people, starting well before high school, as workforce investment.

For education leaders, that might start with a simple question: where are students already practicing the skills employers say they need? For business leaders, it might mean asking what their organization could offer before students are old enough to apply for a job at all, whether that's mentors, site visits, a problem worth solving, or a chance to see the work up close. For community leaders, it might mean asking what barriers, such as transportation, cost, or distance, keep families from reaching opportunities that already exist nearby.

The Bigger Purpose

That vision also helps explain why CAMP’s work with Afterschool educators includes more than academic support alone. When educators build experiences where students investigate, design, collaborate, revise, and reflect, they're helping students build skills that travel far beyond a single afternoon, the same skills Morton is describing when she talks about human capacity.

Her hope for the future of Afterschool learning follows the same belief: every child, regardless of zip code or family circumstance, gets access to programs that build curiosity, leadership, and confidence.

"They aren't limited by their zip code," she said. "These opportunities are just a given."

If workforce development is the work of building human capacity, then that work cannot wait until a student is old enough to apply for a job. It is already happening when children solve problems, learn to work with others, recover from mistakes, discover interests, and begin imagining futures they had not considered before. That is why Afterschool belongs in the workforce conversation.

As Morton puts it,

"It's worthy of value because it's about people."

With thanks to: Margaret Morton, Executive Director and CEO, Sylacauga Alliance for Family Enhancement (SAFE)

Learn More