Published: September 12, 2008 08:46 am      

Garrett board members hope new career center won’t diminish programs offered at high schools

OAKLAND — Though there will be a new Career and Technology Training Center in Garrett County, hopes are that the programs there will not diminish those already being offered at the high schools.

“(My concern) would be the preservation of our programs,” Jim Raley, president of the board of education, said. “I know our machine tool program has struggled to some extent. I know you’ve all committed yourselves to increase the numbers in that. I would obviously ask that we exercise extreme caution that this program wouldn’t further diminish our machine tools program.”

Superintendent Wendell Teets said at the board of education meeting Tuesday that he has been given the impression this would be an extension of what is offered already. While the machine tool program continues, he said the number of students participating has not justified having a teacher at each school for the program, but work continues to increase student numbers.

Raley said he was concerned that students already in the career training program would opt to attend classes through Garrett College as students in the academic program do, which could shrink the number of students participating in a program and the schools’ ability to continue to offer that program.

Kurt Lear, director of secondary education, said the Maryland State Department of Education recognizes career technology courses as they are. He said there is no possibility to trade one portion for a class offered at the college.

Lear said the new CTTC would be aimed largely at adults needing training or retraining for their jobs. It also would provide a larger area for the welding program, which has outgrown its location on campus.

Thomas Carr, board member, questioned whether the college had looked into using the high school facilities for their programs rather than reformatting the former Phenix building in Accident for those same purposes, rather than using $1 million in state money and $500,000 in county funds to establish the center.

The offer has been made, Teets said, but an evening adult program at the schools did not garner any interest when it was tried in the past.

Lear said the new center would also be Phase 2 in the Garrett County Scholarship program, which pays for the first two years of college for qualifying high school graduates.

Rodney Durst, board vice president, said he felt the center will take away and the scholarship program already is taking away from the board at the programs it can offer.

“I said I would go along with (the county scholarship) as a great thing as long as the school board’s budget would not be cut,” Durst said. “Low and behold, two years later, the scholarship is still going on and our budget got cut tremendously this year.

“Now this thing is going on,” he said. “How much of our tax dollars are going to this? Now, we got a mandate from the state saying that we pay tax and we (finance) K-12 and now we’ve got a creep going. I’m going to start paying for college, start paying for these things when we know well the state budget is being cut, the economy in this country is going down and we keep creeping toward these things.”

Contact Sarah Moses at smoses@times-news.com.