“We treat you like a kid until you walk across the stage, and we’re like, ‘see ya.’ ‑– That doesn’t work,” said Canton City Schools Superintendent Jeff Talbert during a roundtable discussion on transforming Ohio high school education.

He’s right, but what do we do about it? How do we prepare young people to move into a job market that looks nothing like it did 10 years ago? Not to mention the structure of a public high school education was solidified generations ago.

According to a report by WCMH, XQ Institute and Battelle Education gathered education experts and state leaders to try to tackle that problem last week.

“We live in the age of artificial intelligence, self-driving taxis and blockchain,” XQ Institute said on its website, according to WCMH. “But our classrooms remain bound to a time-based system designed to deliver learning in 45-minute increments, to prepare students for jobs that no longer exist.”

Among the ideas pitched were ways to get high school students more involved in the workplace before they graduate. Challenges include transportation, age and experience, safety and curriculum priorities that are only recently shifting to looking at career readiness as early as middle school.

Talbert pitched the idea of a system that would more easily allow students to leave campus for work opportunities. Among his examples was having two students split one professional role, which would allow them to trade between days at school and days at work (and therefore be less disruptive to them and their employers), according to WCMH.

But one of the troubles with modernizing anything is that at about the time everything is set, what is “modern” has long-since changed, and making changes in anything the size and scope of Ohio’s public school system will be time consuming and costly.

Even when necessary, change isn’t easy. Those who are looking for ways to do better for Ohio students and employers have taken on a tall task.

While it is encouraging then to know educators and other stakeholders are having these discussions, they must do so in a way that figures out how to get the timing right for Ohio students AND does not create a burden for Ohio taxpayers.