After about a decade of serving students in the Bentonville School District, Ignite Professional Studies will soon expand to serve an additional eight districts to prepare Northwest Arkansas students for post-grad life.
Ignite Professional Studies is a branch of the Bentonville School District founded in 2015. The program offers a “profession-based learning model” to juniors and seniors in the district, giving students opportunities to earn college credit or certifications, meeting industry professionals in the region, and to do hands on projects and internships.
“One of our core values here is to be responsive to industry,” Jessica Imel, Principal at Ignite said. “We often go out and ask our industry partners and mentors for the 10th thing on their to do list, something that’s relevant that’s happening in the industry. And then our instructors turn that into curriculum projects and experiences for students. And so our students are working on real world problems.”
Ignite offers 10 fields of study, or “career strands”, to students, including aviation, construction management, culinary arts, digital media, education, engineering, business, health sciences, law, and technology.
According to Imel, students in the program spend half of their day in the classroom, and the other half participating in a variety of activities to prepare them for post-graduation. These activities include internships, earning college credits, projects, earning certifications, and meeting industry professionals in the community.
Students in the health sciences strand, like Bentonville High student Marisa Sutton, are given training and skills needed in healthcare at Ignite and then given opportunities to put those into practice at clinicals. This year, Sutton has been working toward her CNA license.
“I definitely feel so much more prepared. I know that going into my undergrad and med school and there on out, I will have a much better foundation,” Sutton said. “It’s been a huge character development as well. I’ve really developed the skills that it takes to go through all these years of schooling, not just the actual foundational hard skills.”
In the engineering strand this year, students were tasked with building small electric vehicles as a part of their curriculum.
“It’s kind of helped me like envision myself as an adult,” Carson Mitchell said.
Technology students are offered opportunities to learn about a variety of subjects, including data analysis, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, and more.
“Ignite teaches a very wide variety of skills, but more importantly, than that, it encourages you to pursue the development of your own skills,” Dallas Hamilton, a junior at Bentonville High in the technology strand said. “It’s done a lot to prepare me for the workforce. I can’t possibly imagine not having the experiences that I have now because regular high school just doesn’t cut it for those skills.”
Hamilton is also an intern with the City of Bentonville, doing traffic related data analysis to help find anomalies in traffic volume around the city.
According to Imel, Ignite currently serves about 600 students, with over 1,000 having applied for the program for the 2025-2026 school year.
“The need to add more seats, the need to add more career connected learning opportunities for students is really critical for the development of workforce in Arkansas,” Imel said
In December, the Bentonville School District announced a partnership with the Alice Walton Foundation and the Heartland Whole Health Institute to expand Ignite.
“Four of our ten career strands are going to utilize space on the new Bentonville Healthcare campus,” Imel said. “We are going to have a building on the new campus and that will serve up to 1500 students.”
After the expansion, Bentonville Schools will be partnering with eight other districts in Northwest Arkansas to provide Ignite’s courses to more students, including:
- Decatur
- Fayetteville
- Gentry
- Gravette
- Pea Ridge
- Rogers
- Siloam Springs
- Springdale
Imel said the hope for the program is to give students an opportunity to develop career skills and connections in their community, and to incentivize them to stay post-graduation to strengthen the state’s workforce.
“In the next few years, they’ll be leaders in our community management roles, leadership in, you know, in city, and health care, and business, and all of those things,” Imel said. “We take accountability in helping students find their way and then hoping that we’re creating young professionals that will end up giving back to the community that helped raise them.”
You can find more information about Ignite on the Bentonville Public Schools website.
