The Butler County Chamber of Commerce will compile data on business leaders with the hopes of getting them more involved in education.

Stan Kosciuszko, chamber president, said a survey will ask about 3,000 business people for their contact information, information about their careers and their willingness to get involved in helping educators shape the work force of the next generation.

“Job shadowing, internships, career fairs, guest speakers, classroom projects or any other way a business might want to get involved in education,” Kosciuszko said.

Kosciuszko said Shannon McGraw, the college tech prep coordinator at Butler School District, is assisting with implementing the survey.

“I sent out an initial letter, and she's going to send out the survey,” he said. “It's a Google survey. She will be sending that out in the next couple days.”

Kosciuszko said the data will then be compiled into a database, an idea presented by Scott Covert of Penn United Technologies, a chamber board member.

The database is meant for all the county's school districts, including Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic, to use in guiding students toward prospective careers and mentoring possibilities, according to Kosciuszko.

“If we get just 10 percent of the 3,000, that'll be 300 businesses in the database,” he said.

Kosciuszko said once the database has participant information, guidance counselors from the districts will be sent a code to access it. Counselors will have read-only privilege to the database.

“It'll be a really nice resource,” Kosciuszko said.

He said he has always felt that businesses should get more involved with students who may be interested in taking the same career path or who are looking for an answer to the question: “What do I want to be when I grow up?”

“It's a nice way for the businesses to become involved in education and our future leaders,” Kosciuszko said. “It also may encourage some of these high school students to go off to college and come back and work here in Butler. There's also a lot of trade opportunities, trade training and apprenticeships.”

Kosciuszko said the survey and database are going to change the way students connect with businesses in their community and how they find their careers.

“Once the other chambers get wind of this, they're going to want to do it too, and I hope so,” Kosciuszko said.