ACTE Postsecondary CTE Summit 2026

This session shares early results and practical lessons from North Carolina’s 9th grade CTE dual enrollment pilot, with a focus on McDowell Technical Community College’s implementation model in partnership with McDowell High School. The presentation highlights how MTCC expanded access to college level CTE coursework by leveraging credentialed high school CTE faculty who are approved to serve as adjunct instructors for the college. Attendees will hear what worked, what required mid course corrections, and what it takes to run a model that is instructionally strong, operationally clean, and built to scale as statewide policy moves toward formalization.


This session will benefit community college academic affairs leaders, CTE deans and directors, dual enrollment and CCP staff, high school CTE administrators, registrars, advising teams, and anyone exploring participation in the pilot or preparing for broader expansion of 9th and 10th grade eligibility. It is also useful for institutions that want to strengthen high school to college instructional alignment, improve partnership workflows, and create earlier on ramps into high demand CTE pathways.


Attendees will leave with clear takeaways they can apply immediately, including a start to finish implementation blueprint that covers partnership planning, faculty credentialing and onboarding, course and curriculum alignment, scheduling and registration processes, student eligibility and advising supports, communication routines, and data tracking for performance reporting. The session will walk through common decision points and pitfalls, and offer practical strategies for maintaining quality control and consistency when instruction is delivered by high school faculty under a college adjunct model.


The session is designed to be interactive. Participants will work through a guided readiness check activity to assess their own local capacity, then engage in short table discussions around staffing, compliance, scheduling, and student support scenarios. A brief planning exercise will help attendees identify their next three actions, key stakeholders to involve, and the data elements they should be capturing now to support internal decision making and future policy reporting.


Deliverables will include a slide deck, a one page implementation checklist, a partnership workflow map that outlines roles and handoffs between the college and high school, a sample instructor onboarding and quality assurance outline, and a simple data tracking template that identifies early performance indicators colleges can use for local reporting and continuous improvement.