Tim Kaine Visits Spotsylvania Career and Tech Center to Talk CTE
Kaine serves as co-chair of the Senate's Career and Technical Education Caucus. He said the nation needs CTE more than ever now.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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With Virginia’s Hampton Roads area poised to become a national center for shipbuilding, as well as offshore wind and energy, there’s going to be an insatiable need in the state for skilled metalworkers, Senator Tim Kaine said Thursday.
Kaine stopped in Spotsylvania to visit with students and tour the county’s Career and Technical Center, during a week of travel around the state to talk about healthcare and job training.
He said he learned during a visit to Hampton Roads that the school system there trained 5,000 students in welding last year—and that’s not enough to meet the demand.
“I just think that if you’re in any of these kinds of metal trades, that there’s just going to be so much work in Virginia,” Kaine said.
Spotsylvania is doing what it can to meet this need, Reitha Abed, principal of the Career and Technical Center (CTC), told the Senator. The center just added Welding 3—a capstone class that “teaches students the industry's emerging technologies” to the course offerings and has requested another welding instructor as part of the budget for next fiscal year.
The welding program, like all Career and Technical Education programs, not only trains students for in-demand jobs, but it also provides an opportunity for a second career for former industry professionals.
Spotsylvania CTC’s welding instructor, Josephus Sotomayor, worked in the trade for years before deciding to seek out a new career. He told Kaine that he attended but did not complete college, so when his wife filled out an application for him for the vacant welding position at CTC, he kept insisting that he wasn’t qualified.
Sotomayor said that even as he interviewed with administration and toured the school, he kept insisting that he wasn’t qualified. “They pointed to a classroom full of kids and said, ‘We can teach you that,’” he recalled. Then they pointed to the empty welding classroom, full of tools of the trade, and said, “But we can’t teach you that.”
Just this week, Sotomayor told Kaine, he received his three-year provisional Technical Professional teaching license from the Virginia Department of Education. Educators with this license can follow a fast-track to full licensure through EducateVA, the Virginia Community College Systems’ career-switcher program.
At least two of the other instructors Kaine spoke with on Thursday—automotive instructor Will Bragg and electrical instructor Jeff Autry—followed a very similar path to teaching at Spotsylvania CTC.
Sue Venable-Shelton, supervisor of career and technical education for Spotsylvania schools, said the staff retention level at CTC is high because both students and staff want to be there.
Kaine noted that if CTE programs are going to be able to meet workforce demands and fill shortages that exist in areas like dental hygiene and other healthcare workers, the state needs to incentivize professionals to leave these fields in order to teach.
“There are not enough instructors because they take a salary cut to teach,” he explained. “We need to think a salary enhancement from the state for instructors.”
Another barrier for students can be the cost of CTE training programs outside of high school and the cost of state board testing that is required to earn job credentials.
Kaine, who sits on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee and is co-chair of the Career and Technical Education Caucus, last year introduced the Jumpstarting Our Businesses by Supporting Students (JOBS) Act, bipartisan legislation that will allow students to use federal Pell Grants to pay for shorter-term job training programs instead of only four-year colleges. Provisions from this legislation were signed into law last year and will go into effect this fall.
In Spotsylvania, the cost of state board exams is offset by the federal Carl Perkins Grant. These grants are allocated to states, and to local school divisions in turn, by the U.S. Department of Education.
Katy Wilkerson, cosmetology instructor at CTC, thanked Kaine for the federal funding, which relieves the cost burden of testing for her students.
“I have seen it change lives in families,” she said.
Wilkerson herself went through a cosmetology program in high school and she’s passionate about what CTE programs offer students. She said she has been selected to sit on the curriculum review board for the Virginia Department of Education’s Master Barbering program.
Barbering is another job that’s facing a workforce shortage, Wilkerson said, and she’s excited to bring the Master Barber program to Spotsylvania.
Venable-Shelton said that of the school division’s 24,000 students, 17,000 are enrolled in a CTE class or program.
For Kaine, that’s more evidence of the “CTE Renaissance” he’s seen burgeoning across the state.
“Our nation really needs this,” he said.
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