Brain drain carries away area valedictorians
Job interview
Ten years ago, they graduated from high school at the top of their class. Like smart kids everywhere, they dreamed of becoming doctors, lawyers, professors and military officers.
Today, 13 high school valedictorians from Volusia-Flagler's class of 1996 have scattered to eight other states and even overseas to launch their careers or continue graduate study. Only one has come back home for a job.
He's Jeremy Carlton, an ordained Baptist minister who has been counseling teenagers at First Baptist Church in Daytona Beach for the past two years.
"My family has been in Port Orange for four generations, so maybe that makes me a little different," Carlton said.
No question, job opportunities are luring the best and brightest of Volusia-Flagler far from their hometown roots.
The other 1996 valedictorians have come back to this area only for occasional visits with their families. More may be showing up this summer as the class reunion season gets in full swing. But nearly all of them said they never seriously considered starting their careers where they grew up because the area lacks jobs in their specialties.
Take Tuan M. Tran, for example. Now a medical student at Emory University in Atlanta, the Spruce Creek High graduate is getting ready to choose a residency program to pursue his interests in immunology and internal medicine. Most likely, he said, it will be at a big-name hospital in either Boston or San Francisco.
"My parents would love for me to come back to Central Florida, but unless they open a big research hospital there, I don't think that would ever happen," Tran said. "My long-range plan is to go to Africa and do more research on vaccines."
Katrina Krochak, 27, has been working as a speech pathologist at an Ocala hospital but now she and her husband, Mark Ouellette, are getting ready to move to Nashville.
"It isn't that we wouldn't consider working or living in Volusia County," said the Father Lopez High School graduate. "But the kinds of jobs that we want and that will further our careers aren't there currently."
But the outward flow is only half the picture. In a highly mobile state like Florida, people are constantly on the move, and for every person moving out of the state, two are entering. Many of them have college degrees.
"I've heard about the brain drain for the past 30 to 40 years," said George Mirabal, longtime president of The Chamber, Daytona Beach/Halifax Area.
"It's nothing new and it's a phenomenon that's not just a Daytona problem; it's national in scope. Every chamber executive in the country talks about it. Young people just don't stay in their hometowns."
Nearly one-third of 20-somethings move to a different state each year, the Census Bureau reports.
But in the brain-drain ebb and flow, Florida gains more than it loses, according to the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a private research group in Boulder, Colo. Of every 100 students who receive a bachelor's degree in Florida, 63 leave the state. At the same time, however, 112 other people with bachelor's degrees move into the state, giving the state a net gain of 149 graduates.
But educated people who migrate to Florida don't scatter evenly throughout the state. Census numbers show they clump in larger metropolitan areas where the best jobs are. Volusia and Flagler counties come up short.
While 24.4 percent of the U.S. adult population over 25 has at least a bachelor's degree, only 21.2 percent of the adults in Flagler have that much education and in Volusia only 17.6 percent.
By comparison, 31 percent of the residents of Seminole County have four-year degrees. In Brevard, 23.6 percent are college graduates.
At Stetson University in DeLand, about a fifth of the students hail from the local two-county area. Kelly Cleary, who heads the university's office of career services, said many of the local seniors tell her they'd like to settle close to campus if they could.
"But they're having trouble finding jobs that pay well," she said. "There might be a $10,000 difference between what they can get here, and what they can get in Orlando, so they're forced to go down to Orlando."
Allene Dupont hears the same story from many of Volusia County's high school graduates. As coordinator of high school services for the county's public school system, she's encountered cases of graduates finishing college and being lured away by pay that's as much as $20,000 higher than local levels.
"I think the Internet is a factor in this," she said. "Students have become more aware of job opportunities throughout the country."
Dupont said she tries to be an optimist. She expects some graduates will return as they tire of big-city stress, seek affordable housing or help care for aging parents.
"I have to hope that at some point in their career they will come back here eventually, but we need them here from the very beginning."
Starting pay is especially important to the many graduates leaving campus with big debts. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the median student loan total for this year's graduates tops $19,000. If a graduate wants to get the debt paid off within 10 years, that means a monthly payment of $200 or more.
But sometimes local students simply don't bother to search out attractive job opportunities that exist close at hand, said Bob Williams, vice president of economic development at Daytona Beach Community College.
"It becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy," Williams said. Students are told countless times as they grow up that Daytona has only low-wage jobs and they come to believe it, he said.
"To counter that, we started holding the Rockin' Jobs trade show each year where we bring high school students to meet local employers. We do it to show the kids there are some cool jobs in this town."
But not as many as there should be, adds Rick Michael, Volusia County's director of economic development.
The county's job shortage is especially severe in office technology and operations centers, the type of better-paying administrative jobs found in the home offices of NASCAR and the Brown & Brown insurance agency.
"For the population of this area, we should have about 27,000 jobs in that segment, " Michael said. "We only have 3,000."
Michael said his staff worked hard to recruit a Coca-Cola operations center and a Ford warranty center during the past two years. The facilities would have created hundreds of jobs. But in both cases, the companies decided to go elsewhere because there were no large office buildings available for an immediate start-up, Michael said.
CAREER QUEST
Mark Soskin, an economist at the University of Central Florida's Daytona Beach campus, said he's been sounding alarms about the brain drain for 15 years, but not many employers seem to care.
"It's not so much the low pay or poor benefits, it's the lack of opportunity for a career," Soskin said. "Most employers don't seem to care about helping their employees develop their skills."
However, there are recent signs of a possible turnaround, Soskin added. He cited a new professional MBA program that UCF-Daytona launched last August that allows working people to get their master's degree by attending classes two nights a week for 19 months.
"Everyone predicted we wouldn't get any interest but we had 85 people come to the information sessions, 39 applied and we accepted 27," he said. Many of the students are getting a helping hand with the program's $27,000 cost from employers like International Speedway Corp. and Ocean Design.
Opportunities like that may help Volusia plug its "big demographic hole" -- people in their 20s, Soskin said.
"We've been hemorrhaging our young people for years and years," he said. "That's why we're the slowest-growing county in Central Florida."
But not every graduate flees Volusia-Flagler, or stays away forever. Diane Dyer, director of secondary education for the Flagler County school system, said she's noticed a growing number of graduates who have come back to the school system in recent years to become teachers. She counted 18 former students who now are on the faculty.
"We recently upgraded our salaries, and we now have the second-highest starting salary in the state," she said. "That may have something to do with it."
This fall, entry-level pay for new teachers in the Flagler system will be $35,847.
That's a lot more than Marcus Sanfilippo made when he accepted a teaching job in the Flagler system in 1999.
"I started at $24,000," the math teacher said. "I had to take a pay cut from the auto body shop where I was working."
Still, he said, he never considered leaving Flagler because his family has lived there for three generations.
"I married my high school sweetheart and both our parents are here. So are my grandparents, my brothers and my sisters," he said. "And I was able to buy a house in Palm Coast when the prices were still cheap."
But Sanfilippo doesn't see many of his high school classmates any more. "A few of them are in the police force but most of them have moved away," he said.
AND ONE CAME HOME
DAYTONA BEACH -- Jeremy Carlton spent nearly three years traveling around America with a guitar and a Bible, talking with teenagers about how to live a Christian life.
But when First Baptist Church, his boyhood house of worship, offered him a youth ministry job two years ago, Carlton jumped at the chance to come home. Port Orange is where his family has lived for four generations and he was happy to return to the Halifax area.
"I've been coming to First Baptist since nine months before I was born, and I love this church," Carlton, 28, said in a recent interview at its youth auditorium. "I also love Daytona because I surf and fish and love outdoor things. And I like its hot weather."
Returning to his roots also has reunited the Warner Christian Academy graduate with his parents and his two brothers at a challenging time for the Carlton family. His father is seriously ill with diabetes and its side effects. "I want to spend as much time as I can with my dad, and this job allows me to do that."
But Carlton has a lot of unfinished business that eventually may pull him away from Daytona Beach -- maybe in two years, or maybe 10. "That's up to God; I'll go whenever God calls me," he said.
One goal is to finish up the final year of a three-year master's program he began at Baptist Theological Seminary in New Orleans after earning a business degree at the University of Florida. However, the seminary was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina's flooding, so it may be awhile before it is fully operational at a temporary location in Atlanta. Carlton is waiting to see what courses the seminary may be able to offer either in Atlanta or at a branch campus in Orlando.
Another option would be to transfer to another seminary recognized by the Southern Baptist denomination. Or, since he already is ordained, he could simply forget the master's, but Carlton said he doesn't think God wants him to give up on the degree.
In the meantime, he said, he enjoys working with young people. He dresses casually in a tennis shirt, khakis and sandals and frequently does gospel jamming with them on his guitar.
"Teenagers are the coolest people on Earth," he said.
Wednesday and Sunday worship services are the focal points of his work week. On other days, he does personal counseling with teens, visits schools and does Web site design work for the church.
Working in Daytona Beach has both advantages and drawbacks, he acknowledged. He finds it fairly easy to muster support for his projects because he knows the church's traditions as well as anyone.
"When somebody says, 'We've always done it this way,' I can tell them 'Yes, I was there doing it, too, and this is why we've got to do it differently.' "
But some of the church's middle-aged people are a little uneasy in accepting him as a spiritual adviser, he conceded. "They see me preaching to them and they still see me as little Jeremy, the kid they used to teach in Sunday school," he said.
Where will he be in five or 10 years? Carlton isn't sure, but he's leaving that up to a higher power.
"One thing I don't want to be is a pastor," he said. "I see myself as a people person on the front line. I love working with the kids, but I realize that a youth minister in his 40s or 50s might be kind of goofy."
Carlton recently married a fellow seminary student who has done mission work in Africa and Korea. He said his wife, Heather, teaches Sunday school at First Baptist but is ready to go with him wherever his ministry takes him.
Carlton has toured in Indonesia and England himself, and is open to the idea of going overseas someday. "Way down the road, international ministry is definitely a possibility."
SOCIAL SCENE
When local employers manage to recruit young graduates, they then face the challenge of retaining them. Sometimes that involves more than just pay and benefits.
"Some companies have a problem keeping their young talent because there isn't the social atmosphere the young people are looking for," said George Mirabal, president of The Chamber, Daytona Beach/Halifax Area.
Michael Ciocchetti, who graduated from Mainland High School in 1996, returned to Daytona Beach in 2003 to start a job at the law firm of Doran, Wolfe. He was glad to find work in the specialty he wanted -- municipal law -- but felt at loose ends at the end of the day.
"Of the close friends I had at Mainland, only two or three of us came back to Daytona," he said. "It was hard to meet other people just starting their careers."
To fill the gap, he joined with a few other people in starting the Young Professionals Group, an informal networking organization that has grown to about 900 in just three years.
"Part of our mission is to help employers recruit other young professionals to the area," he said. "That's not always easy because there's a perception there's not a lot to do around here."
The group sponsors a variety of luncheons, parties, field trips and cruises. As it has grown, it has started forging ties with the Daytona chamber. And it's helped its hometown-bred members broaden their social circle.
"The friends I have now are not the friends I grew up with," Ciocchetti said. "Things change."
tom.brown@news-jrnl.com
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
1. WARNER CHRISTIAN ACADEMY, South Daytona: Jeremy Carlton, 28, is the only class of 1996 valedictorian to return to the Volusia-Flagler area. Carlton was considering becoming a doctor or veterinarian when he started studies at Daytona Beach Community College. But after transferring to the University of Florida, the devout Baptist received a "call from God" that he should enter the ministry, a decision that led him to a part-time church job in Gainesville, a seminary in New Orleans and then three years of traveling mission work throughout the nation before he accepted a job doing teen outreach for his home church, First Baptist Church in Daytona Beach. He expects to stay here at least a few years more -- but not forever.
2.TAYLOR HIGH SCHOOL, Pierson: Elizabeth Fogleman Hewitt, 27, works in Athens, Ga., as a research chemist for Noramco, a research and development group for Johnson & Johnson. Hewitt received her bachelor's in chemistry and biochemistry at Stetson University and a master's in chemistry at Duke. Her first job was with Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in Ann Arbor, Mich. Hewitt said she wanted to escape Michigan winters, so when her husband-to-be was offered a job with a scientific instrument manufacturer in Georgia, she jumped at the chance to move back to the South and be closer to her family in DeLand.
3-4. DELAND HIGH SCHOOL, DeLand: Co-valedictorians Elizabeth Fansher and Alina Opreanu took divergent paths after graduation, one heading to Chicago and the other to the Boston area.
Fansher, 28, is working as a medical editor for The Hamilton Group in Chicago. . After graduating from Wheaton College in Illinois with a double major in English and psychology, she stayed in the Chicago area for an entry-level job in publishing, said her mother, Rosemary Fansher. She switched to Hamilton after the firm offered to double her salary.
She has no plans to return to Florida because she enjoys the colder weather, broader cultural life and higher salaries that Chicago offers, her mother said.
Opreanu, 28, has stayed in academia, teaching French at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., while pursuing a doctorate.
5. DELTONA HIGH SCHOOL, Deltona: Nikisha Ranger, 27, works at a hospital in Flushing, N.Y. in the physical therapy department. Her father, Wilbert Ranger, said she attended Seminole Community College, where she received her associate degree, and the University of Central Florida, which she left after two years without receiving a degree. Ranger worked in physical therapy locally for about a year before moving to New York, her father said.
6.-7 PINE RIDGE HIGH SCHOOL, Deltona: Co-valedictorians Margaret and Megan Edmonds, 28, are identical twin sisters who both are captains in the Air Force, one stationed in North Dakota and the other based in New Jersey. The sisters, now married to Air Force captains, were only 13 when they decided on military careers, according to their father, Dan Edmonds, a retired Pine Ridge High teacher who also has a military background. .
Both graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2000. Megan Edmonds Hart is a squadron section commander at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Margaret Edmonds Barry is an aircraft commander due to return soon to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey from duty in the United Arab Emirates, Air Force officials said.
They've always been "explorers and outward looking," their father said. And it's not likely either will return to Volusia County except for visits, he added.
8. SPRUCE CREEK HIGH SCHOOL, Port Orange: Tuan M. Tran, completing a dual-doctorate program at Emory University's School of Medicine in Atlanta, already has done field work on malaria in Brazil and hopes to make a career of disease research in the Third World. Tran, the son of a doctor, started his academic career by earning an undergraduate degree in zoology at the University of Florida. From there, he enrolled in Emory's medical scientist program, completing a doctorate in immunology and now working on his M.D. His next step will be to select a residency in internal medicine later this year, probably in Boston or San Francisco.
9. FLAGLER-PALM COAST HIGH SCHOOL, Palm Coast: Amanda Hammond Rapp recently moved from West Palm Beach to Atlanta, both for her husband's law career and her own work in business law. In her new location, the attorney continues handling appellate cases out of her home-based office for her Florida employer, Page, Mrachek, Fitzgerald and Rose. Growing up in Flagler Beach, Rapp decided early on she wanted to be a lawyer like her father, Judge Kim Hammond. When she went off to Florida State to earn her bachelor's and law degrees, Tallahassee "felt like a huge city, " she recalled. "After getting my degrees, I never really thought about going back to Flagler to work, although I love to visit there."
10. SEABREEZE HIGH SCHOOL, Daytona Beach: Clare Douglass, 28, is pursuing a doctorate at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill with plans to teach English literature. She received a bachelor of arts from Wake Forest in 2000. "Although I hope to stay in the South to work after I earn my degree, I doubt that I will return to Daytona Beach," she said. "The job market in my field is such that I don't have any idea where I will end up at this point, and I will have to go wherever a job is available. . . However, I would love to be close to my family and will look into teaching positions at colleges and universities in other parts of Florida."
11. FATHER LOPEZ HIGH SCHOOL, Daytona Beach: Katrina Krochak, 27, is a speech pathologist in Ocala but is getting ready to move to Nashville for her husband's job as a pharmacist. Her husband is Mark Ouellette, a fellow Father Lopez graduate. She got her bachelor's degree in biomedical research from Vanderbilt. She moved to Gainesville in 2002 to get a master's degree at UF in speech pathology. After graduating in 2004, she began working at a hospital in Ocala.
"We are very excited about living in Nashville, but will miss the beach and being close to our parents," she said.
12. MAINLAND HIGH SCHOOL, Daytona Beach. Vinayak Shandbhag, 26, is finishing up his doctorate in pharmacology at Emory in Atlanta after earning a bachelor's in chemistry from Bethune-Cookman College, where his dad is a professor.
13. NEW SMYRNA BEACH HIGH SCHOOL, New Smyrna Beach: Sheldon Ebbeler, 28, is in Orlando, working as a behavior analyst with autistic children at QuestKids , a nonprofit Central Florida organization. After high school, Ebbeler attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and then transferred to the University of Central Florida, where he earned a bachelor's degree in physics. Switching to linguistics, he earned a master's degree at the University of Florida, and has focused on behavioral analysis ever since. Ebbeler, who has a wife and baby daughter, said he's flexible about where he might settle in the future, and hasn't ruled out Volusia County, where he still has family. "It's still appealing," he said.
14. ATLANTIC HIGH SCHOOL, Port Orange: Thien-Thanh Tran is working at the University of Central Florida's office of student development in Orlando. She declined comment on her career plans.
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