The building design of many comprehensive high schools can hamper communication and collaboration between academic and career and technical teachers. Leaders at Texarkana Area Vocational Center and Arkansas High School, two parts of a large campus in the Texarkana, AR, school district, launched a successful effort to unify the campus and strengthen relationships among staff members. The project prompted teachers to understand their students better and to design more interdisciplinary projects to combine academic and career studies.

Representatives from the school say that students were better engaged in real-world math and literacy activities on a more regular basis, which has allowed them to focus on how these academic skills fit into their career plans and would assist them in the future. Students were also reading, writing, and calculating on a weekly basis in their technology courses to support their academic coursework while learning practical applications of these skills.

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