AN INVITATION — AND AN ASK
This portfolio was prepared for review with Grand Haven's Director of Curriculum, and it opens with its request. Our students learn the tools agencies use every day — SMS, email, voice, and A.I. agents, Advanced Intelligence put to practical work for local businesses — by doing real work, for real merchants, under coaching. We are asking the district to review what follows against one question: where does this belong? In an existing course, in career and technical education, at the career center — and who is already teaching near it?
The four tools are only the surface. Underneath them sits agency-level work at every level — campaigns, funnels, and websites built for real businesses — and two kinds of learning wrapped around it: coursework written for the work itself, and training for the people who run it. Merchants already use that coursework to teach their own employees. That same body of learning is what we are asking the district to review — because what teaches a merchant's staff today is what a school can teach its students tomorrow.
All of it — the work, the coursework, and the training — is hosted in one platform. And the end of this road is not ours to keep: in time, that platform, and the pathway running on it, could be the district's own.
Participate in shaping it, or point us to who should. Either answer moves this forward, and we are grateful for both.
Education pipeline portfolio
A continuous community pathway—from middle-school leadership to high-school experience, college-level campaigns, certification and income. The programs already exist. Our work is to connect them.
THE WORK BEHIND THE TOOLS
Before a business may text a customer, place a trusted call, or run a private member network, it must pass through registration and certification gateways run by carriers, registries, and the FCC. Agencies do this work daily. No classroom teaches it yet. Every gateway below is real work a student can begin learning now — and a completed registration is proof a portfolio can hold.
Before a business may send one marketing text, its brand is registered and vetted (legal name and EIN verified), each campaign is approved with sample messages and proof of customer opt-in, and its numbers are assigned to that campaign. Unregistered texts are blocked. Students start here: completing real registrations for real merchants, through the RezConnect platform.
Every business number is provisioned, assigned, and reputation-scored — a number's good name decides whether its calls and texts arrive. Students learn to assign numbers properly and protect their standing.
Federal law grades every business call for verified identity — A, B, or C. A C-grade arrives as "Scam Likely." Businesses register in carrier Trust Centers so their calls come through trusted. Students learn why calls get flagged, and how registration fixes it.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records must be published and aligned before Google and Yahoo will deliver a business's mail at volume. Students learn to authenticate a domain the way professionals do.
Businesses increasingly gather their customers in private, branded member communities instead of public feeds. There is no certificate for building one — the portfolio is the credential. Students build, moderate, and grow them, and the work itself is the proof.
Advanced Intelligence now answers phones and messages customers — under consent and disclosure rules that are still being written. Students learn to deploy agents the compliant way: with permission, transparency, and a human coach in the loop.
This is the gateway the pathway teaches students to walk through — delivery, security, and compliance — the part of modern business no curriculum covers and every employer needs.
This fall, GHAPS’ Innovation Task Force began asking the community a question: how can we innovate teaching and learning so that the student experience is relevant and engaging? Their method is design thinking — listen first, understand needs, and explore before building solutions. Their Vision for Learning names the traits: collaboration, critical thinking, empathy, resilience, communication, curiosity.
What you’re holding is one community answer to that question — already built, already running: eighth graders building the technology, seniors in the field introducing it to local businesses, students learning by doing real work for real people, and earning in the open. No predetermined model — a listening process that became a pathway.
It’s offered the way the Task Force is working: as one more voice in the conversation.
This is not a collection of disconnected youth programs. It is one long runway: service creates confidence, leadership creates responsibility, real customers create skill, and skill creates choices.
Builders Club gives middle-school students a place to lead through service.
Key Club strengthens teamwork, ownership and a service-first mindset.
Every affiliate begins with a real conversation and a real customer.
Keep opening doors, or learn to build the systems customers need.
Demonstrated ability becomes portable skill, credibility and income.
The promise: a young person should be able to see the next step before they finish the one they are on.
The strongest plan is not another new program competing for attention. It runs through a trusted international family of programs and makes the handoffs between them stronger.
Service, confidence and leadership at the beginning of the pathway.
Student-led service with greater responsibility and a wider community view.
A bridge for continued service and leadership as students enter higher education.
A place for adults with disabilities to lead and serve in their communities.
By helping charter and sponsor Builders Clubs, local Kiwanis leaders can reach service-minded students years before graduation—and keep a warm, supported path open into high school, training and real work.
This is patient community building. We are not waiting until senior year to introduce purpose.
A young person enters through service and keeps moving—into leadership, real work, earned skill, income and higher education. Every handoff is visible. Every step is supported. And the entire journey stays connected to the community that helped them begin.
Builders Club starts the journey early. Through service, a student learns to show up, work with others and see that their effort can change something close to home.
Key Club gives that student greater ownership—planning with peers, leading projects and building the confidence to carry responsibility beyond the classroom.
The student lands a first customer, then chooses the Seller track or the Builder track. A coach stays close while the student learns to open doors, listen well and build what a local merchant actually needs.
Progress through Seller, Builder and Expert certification makes growth visible. Coaching, practice and completed work become credibility, portable skill and a path to real income.
At Grand Valley State University, Robin Spring carries applied learning forward as her students build real advertising campaigns for major vendors. The pathway continues through higher education, competition, deeper expertise and new professional choices.
Dean Nash introduced Michael Rutherford to Kiwanis—and to a way of thinking that still guides this work: good growth plans are executed through strong programs already in place.
This pathway honors that mentorship by carrying the lesson forward. The starting point is not a platform or a campaign. It is one person showing another person how community structures can become engines for opportunity.
Mary Jane Evink can help shape the school-side pathway. The Ottawa Area ISD’s Careerline Tech Center is the pathway’s career-center door — where local merchants and the high school meet. Robin Spring can help connect it to college-level campaign work and professional expectations. Together, the handoff becomes designed—not accidental.
Director of Curriculum, Grand Haven Area Public Schools. The bridge into school partnerships, student learning and a pathway educators can support.
The intermediate district behind Careerline Tech Center in Holland — 30 state-approved career and technical programs serving eleven districts, Grand Haven and Spring Lake among them, and built on partnerships with local businesses. Jason Pasatta leads its teaching and learning services; Dave Searles leads career and technical education. This is where merchants meet the high school.
Open the OAISD portfolioGrand Haven alumna, Michael’s classmate, and a Grand Valley State University professor in the School of Communications’ Advertising & PR program. Portfolios are the spine of her teaching: at the Lilly Conference in Traverse City this October she presented “Brand Yourself: Motivation and Career Readiness Through Portfolio Work”—students gathering their best work into a portfolio that gives them agency and value beyond the classroom—and earned a certificate for it. Her students run full campaigns for major vendors, including an NFL assignment last year, judged regionally and nationally, and her teams have earned titles.
Michael’s connection point: Robin’s conviction is the same one this page is built on—real work, gathered and shown. She has taught it for years, from her Lilly session “15 Steps to Group Project Success,” where group work leaves students with portfolio pieces, to the Campaign Portfolio where her Grand Valley students’ campaign work lives. That is why she is this pathway’s champion: the portfolio idea is already proven at the top of the path, in her classroom.
The cause gives the work heart. The platform gives the work a home. Students learn by helping something real move forward.
Year-round live local music, youth music grants and community impact give students a mission they can see, hear and share.
It is more than a case study. It is the community cause the pipeline can gather around.
Planners plan. Students execute. And in teaching the students, the students build it.
The classroom is the work. Students are not practicing on make-believe businesses. They are learning to create value for real organizations in their own community.
RezConnect.store Membership Training Coursework
You use A.I. to write something for a merchant — a welcome message, a review response, a proposal. The first draft comes back close. You fix the tone. You add the details. You take out the stuff that doesn't fit.
Next week you make the same kind of thing for a different merchant. The first draft comes back — and the fixes you already made are gone. You're fixing the same things again.
That's not a you problem. That's a missing-standards problem.
Every correction you make is a decision about your work. Decisions shouldn't live in your head or in one chat thread. They should live in a standard — a short list of yes-or-no checks — so the next piece gets checked before it's finished.
Students who do this stop repeating corrections. Their work gets faster and better at the same time. That's the whole game.
One deliverable, not five. Pick something you'll make in the next few weeks: a merchant welcome message, a review response for a restaurant, a thank-you text after a sale, a client recap after a meeting, a short proposal. Pull up the last two or three you made. You'll need them for Step 2.
Look at what you changed after A.I. gave you the first draft. Write each one down in your own words. Be specific. "Make it more professional" is too vague — useless. "Take out the exclamation points in the first paragraph" works. Your corrections are the most valuable thing in this exercise. Don't skip any.
A check is a question you can answer by looking at the output: "Are there exclamation points in the first paragraph?" Yes = fail, fix it. "Is the merchant's street address under the business name?" No = fail, add it. Rules for good checks: use your own words; no vague words like "professional," "good," or "nice" unless you say exactly how to tell; one check per correction; and keep the merchant's private facts OUT of the checks — names, prices, dates, addresses change every time. The check says "Is the price in the second paragraph?" — never "Is the price $49?"
Give the standard (your checks plus one example of the work done right) to A.I. along with the new merchant's details. When the draft comes back: run every check; fix anything that fails; if you still had to correct something by hand, decide which kind it is — missing instruction (add it, with a check), instruction too loose (use your words), or right for that merchant only (leave the standard alone). Test again next time. One fix per round. That's how standards get strong.
The piece: a review response for a restaurant. The corrections Maya made last month, in her own words: "Thank them by name if they gave one." "Don't say 'we're sorry' more than once — it sounds desperate." "End with an invitation to come back, not a coupon." Maya's checks: "If the reviewer gave a name, do I thank them by name?" "Does the phrase 'we're sorry' appear more than once?" "Does it end with an invitation to come back, not a coupon?" Three corrections. Three checks. Every review response she writes now runs through them. She hasn't fixed the same thing twice in a month.
Every standard you build is a repeatable skill. That's what goes in your portfolio — not "I used A.I.," but "I built a standard that makes every review response come back right, and here's the proof." Merchants don't pay for prompts. They pay for work that comes back right the first time. Your standards are your product.
Method inspired by Kathryn Brown's “Capture Your Standard.”
THE COMMUNITY CONNECTION
A curriculum does not run on its own — it runs where the students will actually work. This pipeline was built with Grand Haven's business community in the room from the start.
Michael Rutherford is a member of the Chamber of Commerce — Grand Haven, Spring Lake, Ferrysburg — and the work showed itself publicly at the Chamber's own BOOMERANG career event on October 13, where students met the pathway where they stood. A standing conversation with Chamber President Mark Allen is open: how membership and sponsorship development itself could be run as a project with measurable results — the same discipline this portfolio asks the district to judge. His portfolio is one tap away, below.
And the long arc runs through the Grand Haven Schools Foundation. In a school deployment, the platform share of every subscription can flow to the Foundation instead of to RezConnect — funding programs while the district's own people learn to run the system. That is the design's end state: a process local nonprofits benefit from, hosted in one platform, which in the end could be the district's own to run.
MARK ALLEN — THE CHAMBER CONVERSATIONThe First Step
Create your Path Plan.
This is it — let’s start it. A few questions about your business — the kind only you can answer. Answer them now, at your own pace — or we’ll walk them together, your call. Either way, your answers become your Path Plan, and our Path Panel goes to work on them — so when we sit down, we’re not starting from zero. We’re starting from YOUR words.
Start My Path PlanTHE FUNDRAISER ENGINE
A standing Sunday in a local room — live music, the venue keeps its food and drink, and the door raises money for the cause: school music, or a nonprofit’s own night.
The presentation now prepared for Grand Haven’s school leadership — the principals of Grand Haven High School and Lakeshore Middle School and Superintendent Kristin Perkowski — presenting the student-owned portfolio pathway, so you can open the very page they will read.
The next move is not another announcement. It is a working conversation, one school partnership and a pathway students can begin to follow.
“You bring the students and the learning. We bring the tools, the coaching and the cause. Together, we build a path from service to real income.”
Prepared as a conversation starter
for Mary Jane Evink and Robin Spring