Principal retiring from Technology Center of DuPage
When Edward Susmilch joined the former Davea Career Center in Addison as its student services manager 24 years ago, he admits he wasn’t fully aware of the good work happening there.
“When I applied here, I honestly didn’t know what Davea was all about,” said Susmilch, who has spent 39 total years in education. “It was a temporary position. But once I got here and found out the philosophy behind this school and the opportunity it provided for kids, I just became a real believer.”
Today, that school is called Technology Center of DuPage and Susmilch has been principal for nearly 18 years. He will retire when classes end in May and administrators are searching for a new principal to lead the school, which provides technical and career training to juniors and seniors from 14 DuPage County high school districts.
Students who attend Technology Center of DuPage take for-credit elective classes that prepare them for careers in areas like cosmetology, automotive service and fire science.
The changes during his tenure have been so drastic that Susmilch calls the center “a completely different organization.” Some major changes that came to the school under his leadership included securing a grant in the 1993-94 school year that connected Technology Center of DuPage to the Internet. It was one of the first schools in DuPage to have access to the web.
“Back 24 years ago, the objective was to get students to the point where they could get a job, any job,” he said. “Vocational education at the time was terminal education. We don’t even use the V-word anymore. We call it career and technical education, because our focus has changed.
“We still want to give kids hands-on skills within a career path, but we want them to see what various career paths are available,” he said. “If you’re thinking, ‘I love cars’ or ‘I love medical’ we say, ‘OK, you love that, but where are you going to be in a year, five years, 25 years and how are you going to prepare for that?”
Today, he said many of his students go on to community colleges or four-year colleges and universities. The center also puts a focus on nontechnical areas of study like English, since Susmilch said strong communication skills are essential in all professions.
“Our kids need to know how to read the complicated information, process it and be very detail-oriented,” he said.
The candidate who becomes the school’s new principal must keep these ideals alive, he said. Right now, administrators have made an open announcement for his post that Susmilch said has attracted a strong pool of internal candidates, as well as “excellent” applicants from around the country.
He said the new principal must continue the center’s focus on finding a balance between academics and technical skills, to prepare students for a world that didn’t even know what a smartphone or hybrid car was 15 years ago.
“That has to continue as the world becomes more technical and complex,” Susmilch said. “The primary thing we can teach students is how to learn, because no one knows how the world is going to look five or 10 years from now. Once upon a time, you could teach them to fix or work with a specific thing and that was a valuable skill. Now the world changes too rapidly.”