Ramstad: With string cheese and simulated blood tests, employers and colleges attract students in Long Prairie

LONG PRAIRIE, Minn. — Noemi Montanez and two friends stepped up to a blood-draw training tool in the gym at Long Prairie-Grey Eagle Senior High School and began taking instructions from a recruiter for Central Lakes College.

After she stuck a simulated vein and drew artificial blood with a real needle, Montanez said she will go to technical college in nearby Alexandria to study engineering. “Then maybe translating,” she added.

“But you were so excited to draw the blood,” said Jennifer Chock, health careers outreach specialist for Central Lakes, who was eager to entice students to its classes in Brainerd and Staples.

“Yeah, because it was fake,” Montanez said. “If it was real blood, I would get weak.”

It was Career Day for Long Prairie’s middle school and high school students last Friday, and every one of the recruiters from approximately 40 employers and colleges offered multiple ideas for directions the students’ lives could take.

“This really came out of our kids not being able to get to colleges or to get to a job fair,” said Brad Evenson, community education coordinator at the school. “So we bring it in and say, ‘Hey, here’s what’s here in the community to help you out.’ When our kids need something, our community, even though a lot of times we don’t have a ton of money, we want our kids to be as worldly and successful as possible.”

Long Prairie, a town of about 3,700 where meatpacking and food processing companies are the leading employers, is the seat of Todd County, which has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the state.

I’ve been following the town’s progress toward a new long-term economic development plan, and I’ll write more about that soon. A deadline passed Monday for public comment, and the next stop for the plan is the Long Prairie City Council.

In my eyes, people in Long Prairie, and towns like it around Minnesota where growth is driven by new immigrants, are the leaders in shaping the future of the state economy. Changes and ideas emerging from these communities show what Minnesota will be like in coming years, just as in the state’s early decades when European immigration fueled growth.

The annual career fair at the Long Prairie school seemed like a perfect opportunity to see how employers feel about hiring right now. I noticed fewer opportunities than there might have been a year or two ago, but demand for workers still remains high.

An important data update from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics showed Minnesota’s labor market is loosening just a bit. In its annual revision of prior-year data done each March, the BLS showed Minnesota’s workforce last May at last grew larger than before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020. March 2020 data started to show job cuts.

Under its previous data, which I last checked in November, Minnesota was one of about a dozen states where the workforce remained smaller than before the pandemic. With the new data, Minnesota in February (the latest month for which data is available) had 23,000 more people in the workforce than it did in February 2020. That represents growth of less than 1% in a workforce of about 3.1 million people.

That’s great to see, though it means that hiring power is shifting a bit toward employers rather than employees.

At the Long Prairie career fair, Steve Bautch, a Land O’Lakes recruiter, said the company had two openings in its dairy plant in nearby Melrose, where more than 3 million gallons of milk are produced each day.

“I think I’ve got those lined up,” he told me even before the career fair was halfway done. He continued handing out string cheese and goodie bags to students, telling them about starting salaries in the $60,000s and tuition assistance for higher education.

Jodi Bertrand, a program director at Lake Beauty Bible Camp just outside of town, hoped to recruit a dozen or more kids for two months of work this summer.

Todd Shaver, a recruiter for St. Cloud-based health care provider CentraCare, said his main goal was to let students know the health system has many jobs available. “I tell the students we’re like a city,” he said. “You don’t have to be a doctor or a nurse. We’ve got management, engineering, food, cleaning, human resources. Just to keep their minds expanding.”

Employer and college participation was higher than ever due to the recruiting efforts of Evenson and Luan Thomas-Brunkhorst, director of the Long Prairie Area Chamber of Commerce.

They reoriented the fair principally around classroom presentations. That gave students more opportunities to ask questions than they could if all were milling around the gym, where the college and employer booths were set up.

Fair attendee Emerson Steffen-Johnson, who I later learned was a star in Long Prairie student theater, was collecting souvenirs from the recruiters in the gym when I watched her experiment with the blood-drawing apparatus alongside Montanez and their friend Emma Robles Martinez.

“I saw someone walking around with the blood vial and I thought, `I want one of those,‘” said Steffen-Johnson, who is deciding between the University of Minnesota and St. Olaf for college.