Chelsea High School offers the SWWC (South and West Washtenaw Consortium) to juniors and seniors, which helps students prepare for their future careers. This program offers a learning experience for the job they want to take, whether it be CAD (computer-aided design) or computer servicing. There are 150 students enrolled in the 2025-2026 consortium year, and these students take buses or drive to the many different schools that host these classes. Schools that are part of this program include Saline, Dexter, Chelsea, Milan, Lincoln, and Manchester. But when these students return, they tend to be late to their class and can even miss lunch.
“I’m pretty sure our lunch on those days ends at 11, but we get lunch until 11:20, and so I’m usually around 16 to 20 minutes late,” Henry Start (‘26) said.
Consortium students arrive missing a majority of A lunch and get a very small time to eat, go to their locker, and actually go to class. But if you don’t have A lunch, then you’re just late to class, missing the warm-up or some instructions that you could easily ask a classmate to teach you.
“It works out really well, just because I have a really chill class. But what I’ve heard from most people is that it works out well because the first, I don’t know, first 5-10 minutes of class are kinda used for warm-ups,” Geer said.
Being late to a class may not be as important when weighing the pros and cons of what the consortium has to offer. What we learn in the consortium can give us background knowledge for our future career paths because of the things we are able to learn within these classes.
“100% of the things we are learning in consortium are incredibly important and incredibly valuable for our careers,” Geer said. “I feel like it’s better to miss a tiny bit of our other classes.”
These students decide whether they wanna do building trades or anything else, but it’s at the cost of being late to the class in Chelsea after. Now these students always tend to arrive late, but the consortium can help the students prepare for the future when they graduate from school.
“I think maybe at the beginning of my junior year, when I had teachers that either didn’t know I had this consortium,” Start said. “But I think after they learned that I had a consortium, it kind of went away.”
