Pushing past home economics stereotypes, these FCS teachers prepare students for a modern workforce

At a high school in rural Center Ridge, Arkansas, students walked into a classroom and stepped into someone else’s shoes.

Klair Jordan, then a 9th grade student, was playing the role of a single mother with four kids. Another classmate took on the perspective of a married stay-at-home mom.

In their lesson with Christina Lloyd, the family and consumer sciences teacher at Nemo Vista High School, they learned about mortgages and credit cards and how to draw up a budget for different life situations.

“We went and bought a house. We had to pay taxes, a car, everything,” Jordan said.

In the 1990s, family and consumer sciences (FCS) — an evolution of what used to be known as home economics — was used to expand the personal and occupational skills of students.

Today, “It’s the whole gamut of life skills,” said Lloyd, whose classroom is its own building, with six kitchens, industrial equipment and plenty of room to sew, craft and create. Project-based learning and decision making are the focus for both hard skills, like financial literacy, cooking and design, and soft skills, like how to present oneself at work or a job interview, how to interact with others, and when to get off your cell phone.

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“I think it’s more about us being successful in our personal life than just at school,” Jordan said.

There’s also a focus on the family unit in its different forms, including immediate family, work family and friends. In her family relations unit, Lloyd teaches her students how to have healthy relationships and discusses the long-term harms of social media, which can be based on a false notion of friendship and “likes.”

“Those are things that we think get taught at home, but they don’t always do,” Lloyd said.

FCS was taught by more than 27,000 teachers in 50 states to about 3.4 million students in 2012, according to a national survey, a drop from the previous decade. In the same survey, half of the states reported challenges in finding highly qualified teachers due to the shuttering of FCS programs at the post-secondary level.

Enrollment today is difficult to measure because of the way states collect and share data, according to Gayla Randel, an FCS professional of 35 years. States collect data based on “career clusters,” and not by program areas, such as family and consumer sciences, Randel said.

According to the Food and Agricultural Education Information System, most states saw a decrease in enrollment at colleges of family and consumer/human sciences from 2020 to 2023, with the greatest percent decreases in Georgia, Michigan, Montana, Arizona and Florida. At the same time, Kentucky, Arkansas, Iowa, Colorado, Wyoming and Delaware are among the states that saw increases in their enrollment. Overall, college enrollment across the country has been decreasing for more than a decade.

FCS college programs with majors in apparel and textiles and personal finance education showed strong growth from 2020 to 2023, while housing and human environments, which focuses on building and assessing the places where people live and work, fell significantly.

The Perkins Collaborative Resource Network publishes state Career and Technical Education (CTE) enrollment numbers by career cluster, including education and training, human services and hospitality/tourism, the primary industries with connections to FCS. Enrollment in these areas saw a high level of fluctuation at the secondary level from 2019 to 2023.

In Lloyd’s state of Arkansas, enrollment in all three of these areas fell during this period, though numbers overall were still higher than most other states. Whereas in California, the hospitality career cluster had about 74,000 students in 2023, up nearly 12,000 students compared to four years earlier.

Those who teach and champion these classes worry that the difficulties of calculating enrollment could hurt funding — and that schools in communities lacking a strong FCS connection could be lost.

“Those working within local, university, state and national-level FCS programs know our ties to the workforce, but some don’t, and that is where the disconnect happens,” Randel said.

A long history of studying life’s problems

Home economics was one of the earliest fields where women of different races excelled in their careers, from food scientists to consumer safety experts, in both government agencies and the private sector, journalist Danielle Dreilinger wrote in “The Secret History of Home Economics,” a book that embraces the rich history of the field and positive influence it’s had on the United States.

In the 1960s, family and consumer scientists safety tested astronauts’ food at NASA. In recent years, they’ve done things like started clothing lines for women construction workers, said Karin Athanas, executive director of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (AAFCS).

“We’re scientists, and so we study the whole life line of consumers. And that includes outside the house, in the environment, at work,” Athanas said. “People are still kind of stuck on the ‘we bake cakes’ situation.”

By the 1980s, home economics departments faced cutbacks or were eliminated altogether thanks to a combination of pushback from the women’s liberation movement, school budget cuts that prioritized courses viewed as more academic and the rise of standardized testing, Randel said.

Public and university education decision makers didn’t understand the integrative nature of the field, she added. Core FCS classes were slowly reassigned to other CTE programs and colleges began to shutter their home economics departments.

FCS educators pushed back. They took significant steps to modernize past the stereotype of a class focused on cooking and sewing. In the 1990s, home economics was rebranded as family and consumer sciences by the AAFCS and other organizations to “more accurately reflect the complexity” of the field. FCS emphasizes consumer education, occupational training and the needs of the workers as both a family member and a wage earner, Randel said.

Classes expanded to focus on hospitality and tourism, food science and nutrition, early childhood education, human services like child care and elder care, personal finance, textiles and apparel, housing and interior design, education and family relations.

“I explain it mostly by telling people we took off our aprons and put on chef coats,” said Sandy Spavone, executive director of Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA), a national student organization.

“The original need of our profession was taking research and academics and applying it to real life to help us improve our quality of life and solve issues for people,” Randel said. That began with a focus on three main areas: access to healthy food, healthy living environments and clean water.

“And what do we have today in 2024? The need for sustainable, healthy food, healthy living environments and access to clean water,” she said. “So that’s never changed. We call it perennial problems.”

Opening career pathways

A picture of Destiny Weaver holding her award-winning coconut cream pie hangs on the wall of her family’s business — the Bucket List Cafe in Center Ridge. As a freshman in high school, she earned both a ribbon and a $75 prize for the pie from the Arkansas State Fair.

In addition to what she learned growing up in her family’s restaurant, Weaver credits Lloyd with advancing her culinary skills and also advancing pertinent job skills, like time management and organization.

Lloyd said her class helps students build skills that allows them greater career opportunities and exposes them to the world outside their small farming community. Several of Lloyd’s students had never been on an escalator before, never mind an airplane.

“Ms. Lloyd, she pushes us to do everything we can,” said 9th grader Avina Owens, who in June traveled to Seattle for a student competition hosted by the FCCLA. Her group presented a project — a dog shelter they built — and were judged not only on the quality of their project but also on their public speaking and entrepreneurial skills.

“It opens doors for them, and it opens job pathways for them that they never thought [of before],” Lloyd said.

Wyatt Pettry was one of six boys from Lloyd’s class who attended the FCCLA conference. Thirty percent of the attendees are male – a far cry from the era when “home economics” was for girls and “shop” was for boys.

“It builds up your confidence and sets your needs and priorities for your life,” Pettry said.

Post-secondary students who majored in family and consumer sciences have ended up in a variety of careers, including hospitality and tourism, retail management, social services and education.

While entry-level jobs may initially start with low wages, particularly in the food industry or in child care, there’s also room for financial growth, said Alyson McIntyre-Reiger, an FCCLA state adviser from Indiana. Child care workers can become school directors and food service providers can become managers.

To be successful, businesses need people to process food, run and clean hotels or bring items to customers in restaurants — work many Arkansans rely on, Lloyd said.

According to U.S. Census data and current population surveys, 15.9 percent of Arkansas residents live in poverty, higher than the national average of 11.5 percent.

About 60 percent in the Nemo Vista School District are from low-income families, said district superintendent Logan Williams. The district draws from Center Ridge, pop. 199, and four other unincorporated communities.

The school is the backbone of the community and Lloyd’s class plays a pivotal role in that, Williams said.

A large number of FCS programs are designed to prepare students to be valuable contributors at work and in their communities, Athanas said.

Lloyd’s class held nine fundraisers over the course of the school year and organized public service events, including anti-vaping and domestic violence campaigns, blood drives, food drives and an effort that made quilts for veterans.

They’ve also hosted several community events, like “Superhero Night” and “Dinner with Disney.” The students plan and cater the events as well as make their own costumes, sign autographs and play games with the younger children who attend.

“For some kids, that’s as close to Disney as they’re going to get,” Lloyd said.

Some FCS students have gone on to become FCS teachers themselves, including a few of Lloyd’s students.

Reno Palombit, now a CTE director in North Carolina, said his FCS teacher in high school built his confidence and prompted him to become an FCS teacher himself.

“I’m a gay male, and it was a safe place for me in the early 2000s,” Palombit said. “To be around all of these, like, amazing women who were leaders and were rocking it out in their career was something that I just really connected with … that they believed in me and supported me and wanted me to excel was something I hadn’t experienced in any other aspect of my life.”

FCS educators face funding challenges

The Perkins Act provides federal funding for CTE programs, an umbrella that currently includes family and consumer sciences. Though it can vary by state, most Perkins funds are distributed through state education offices with regional coordinators working directly with school districts.

Most states base their CTE programs and funding models on which industries are in demand in their state as well as national recommendations created by Advance CTE, a nonprofit that serves state CTE education offices.

“We were very intentional to only feature middle- and high-skill kind of careers,” said Kate Kreamer, the organization’s executive director. “Those are the jobs that are going to have opportunities for family-sustaining wages, and opportunities for advancement and benefits.”

Those industry sectors or “career clusters” include advanced manufacturing, agriculture, education, energy, hospitality, health and human services and management, among others.

Kreamer said that while FCS is not explicitly named in the national set of recommendations, FCS courses are embedded throughout the various career clusters and hold significant value for their interdisciplinary potential.

“It’s up to states to implement, to adopt and implement in the way that kind of works for them,” she said.

Athanas worries that funding for FCS programs have suffered without a reference by name in the national recommendations.

The decision by universities to shutter family and consumer sciences programs over the previous few decades has caused some teacher preparation deserts.

In 2015, several organizations launched a “Say Yes to FCS” campaign to get the word out about FCS’ value, as well as encourage it as a profession. Part of the aim was specifically to boost enrollment of family and consumer sciences’ majors at the college level to deal with the teacher shortage.

“There was this projection that FCS would no longer be a profession. Why would you go into FCS teaching when there’s going to be no jobs?” Randel said. “Which is a myth.”

With CTE federal funding not keeping up with inflation over the last few decades, CTE coordinators in Arkansas are under more pressure to write grants to fill in the funding gaps.

Lloyd has also written several of her own grant applications. She’s received funds from the Arkansas Farm Bureau for a school garden and state agencies like the Arkansas Securities Department for a commercial printer for banners on financial literacy.

On top of teaching, Lloyd works three other jobs as a school bus driver, caterer and cleaner.

“I am no different than other FCS teachers. We’re all super busy and dedicated to this job,” she said.

Many of Lloyd’s programs involve afternoon, evening and weekend events outside school hours. In the summer, she created a culinary camp for younger kids taught by Lloyd’s high school students based on the skills she taught them.

“There’s times that as an administrator, I’m like, we need to step back and slow down. But ultimately, I know that she has her kids’ best interest in mind,” said Williams. “And the kids love her for it.”

Lloyd seeks out donations for supplies from her tight-knit community. Whenever she posts to her class’s Facebook page with a request, she immediately receives responses.

She encourages fellow FCS teachers to have strong relationships with their communities. Lloyd has seen teachers lose their jobs because they didn’t modernize and advocate, a must in this particular field, she said.

“If you make yourself present in the community, the community will back you,” Lloyd said.

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.