Rockbridge County’s renovated career and technical education facility has only been open since January. But the new look for the building attached to the county high school is already a big hit.
The 1970s-era facility, formerly known as the Floyd S. Kay Technical Center, was dark. It offered little natural light. Paige Owens, director of career and technical education at Rockbridge County Public Schools, described its old color scheme as “this kind of dark, ugly, green, goldish color.”
If a student didn’t have class in the center, they didn’t want to be there, Owens said.
Now? “Kids absolutely flock to that area.”
A key feature of the center is the common area that’s open to all students — even those who aren’t enrolled in CTE classes.
It’s a place to socialize or work on assignments with friends, but also provides exposure to what the CTE center has to offer. “They’re able to easily see what our culinary kids do and what our engineering kids do and what our agriculture kids do,” Owens said.
As part of the renovation process, which began in 2022, the facility was renamed the Rockbridge Innovation Center. A ribbon-cutting ceremony to officially reveal the $14 million expansion took place in June.
About 920 students from Rockbridge County and the city of Lexington attend the county high school and have access to CTE classes at the center.
“A lot of counties around us have CTE centers that are not connected to their high schools,” Owens said. That proximity to Rockbridge County High School allows any student to build CTE courses into their schedule, rather than needing to spend a half-day at a separate location.
About 36% of Virginia high school students earned a CTE credential during the 2023-2024 school year, according to data from the Virginia Department of Education. That credential could be in the form of a state professional license, an industry certification or an occupational exam.
In Rockbridge County, the rate is higher: About 48% of students earned a CTE credential.
Interest has already increased for some of the county’s CTE programs, Owens said. The division won’t know exactly by how much until a few months into the school year. But some preliminary rosters were maxed out the week before school started, with students on wait lists, he said.
For many of the dozen-plus concentrations within CTE, additional space is a major benefit. The small animal care program, for one, used to take place in a regular classroom. Now, that classroom has lab space, a kennel and a wash bay. The program plans to start a grooming business to give students experience working with clients and provide a needed service to the community, Owens said.
Firefighting among new offerings at renovated CTE center
A benefit of renovating the CTE center was establishing room to grow and add new programs.
One new course starting this fall is firefighting. Rockbridge joins fewer than 10 other school divisions around the state that have such programs.
Most of the others are in Northern Virginia, the Tidewater region or the Richmond area, said Shane Watts, training lieutenant for Rockbridge County Fire-Rescue and Emergency Management.
Watts has a half-dozen firefighting students this year, and 13 in the emergency medical technician course that launched at the school in 2019.
Along with classroom space, Watts has access to training tools, including a training ambulance and a decommissioned fire truck from a nearby volunteer department.
“We don’t have to take a bunch of field trips” to train students, Watts said. “We can do it here.”
Watts said the goal is to alleviate the regional impact of a nationwide shortage of firefighters by developing high school students’ interests and skills.
Ty Dickerson, chief of the Lexington Fire Department, said he hopes that the new CTE program results in new volunteers and career firefighters for his department. Lexington has a combination fire department, where career firefighters and volunteers work together. “Many of the departments around us are 100% volunteer,” he said.
Dickerson said a high school student who completes the EMT program at the high school, along with the firefighting program, “could graduate from high school fully trained to be a career firefighter and get hired.”
Lexington’s fire department has moved some of its training props over to the high school to support the new program.
Watts said he hopes to grow the firefighter program to 10 students per year.
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Correction 12:55 p.m. Aug. 20: An earlier version of this story included incorrect information about dual-enrollment credits for firefighting students.