Stafford, Caroline Awarded GO Virginia Region 6 Funding to Support Extended Career Pathways
Funding will help train students in data center operations, logistics, GIS, supply chain management, unmanned aviation, fiber, and more.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Every day, close to 120,000 people leave the Fredericksburg, Northern Neck, and Middle Peninsula to work outside of the region.
Meanwhile, data centers and logistics operations are coming to the region quickly, and there are not enough people qualified to staff them.
“That gap — between the jobs being created here and the trained workers available to fill them — is a problem we are here to solve,” Caroline County Public Schools wrote in a pitch for funding from GO Virginia Region 6, the regional council of the statewide Virginia Initiative for Growth and Opportunity, known as GO Virginia.
Last month, GO Virginia Region 6 announced the award of $2.5 million to three projects across the council’s coverage area, which includes Planning Districts 16, 17, and 18.
Of that, $965,601 will go to a joint project between Caroline and Stafford County Public Schools that will expand career and technical education pathways, preparing students to work in high-demand industries such as data centers, logistics, and information technology.
“We are so excited,” said Amy Nearman, assistant director of college and career readiness at Stafford County Public Schools. “We really feel that with data centers coming in … we wanted to make the I-95 corridor an extension of technology and innovation to support several developing areas.”
In Stafford, the two-year funding will support programming at two of the division’s specialty centers—the Engineering Professions and Industries of Construction, or EPIC, Center; and the Aerospace, Supply Chain, Energy, and Navigation Technologies, or ASCENT, Center.
The EPIC Center, which opened two years ago, houses pathways in data center operations and fiber optics. The ASCENT Center opens in August, and will offer pathways in global logistics, supply chain management, sustainable energy, and unmanned aviation, as well as aerospace engineering.
The GO Virginia funding will pay for training existing staff to teach these new career pathways, Nearman said.
“We will need to up-skill staff members in these areas because they are brand new for us,” she said. “We don’t have instructors in some of these areas—for example, we don’t have a fiber expert.”
The funding will also cover industry certifications for staff and students, but the bulk of it will pay for the required “very specialized, expensive equipment” needed for these pathways, Nearman said.
“We like that aspect of the grant because it makes it sustainable for us,” she said. “We’re not paying teachers with it, but we can use it to build the infrastructure so it’s sustainable long-term.”
In Caroline County, the GO Virginia funding will bolster programming offered at the Academies at Caroline, which were introduced several years ago at Caroline High School. Students apply to one of three academies at the end of their freshman year.
“Within each academy, there are a number of different pathways,” said Autumn Nabors, director of secondary education at Caroline County Public Schools. “With this grant, we wanted to build out a more robust tech pathway.”
In addition to building a stronger IT pathway, the GO Virginia funding will support adding career pathways in GIS and unmanned aircraft. As in Stafford, the money will be used to train existing instructors, update computer hardware, and purchase specialty equipment.
Caroline is recruiting students for the new pathways now and hopes to start next year with 50 enrolled in the first level GIS course. Stafford is hoping to start with 20-25 students in each of the new pathways.
“The focus is on really ensuring that this region’s needs are met and preparing our students for the future workforce in this region,” Nearman said. “We want to keep our students here—we’re tired of shipping them off to Northern Virginia!”
Nabors said the division knows through its Career and Technical Education Advisory Board that businesses need the skills students will learn in the new career pathways.
“This is something our community needs,” she said.
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