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A Washington County school has provided details about its plans for a $2.5 million grant it was awarded.
Gov. Mike DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted announced Monday the recipients of the Career Technical Education Equipment Grant.
A total of 56 schools will receive more than $67.7 million to help expand career technical education to an additional 10,345 students by helping schools purchase up-to-date equipment to better prepare students to be career ready upon graduation, according to a media release.
One of the recipients of the grant is the Washington County Career Center, who announced on their Facebook page they received $2.5 million.
WCCC Superintendent Tony Huffman the school is happy they received the grant.
"It's very fortunate for our students and our local workforce," he said.
Huffman has been at WCCC for 12 years and this is the biggest grant they've ever received in his time at the school, he said. WCCC is going to use the grant funds on five of their high school programs - welding, patient health care, medical college prep, pre-nursing and sports medicine exercise science, according to Huffman.
He said approximately $500,000 of the grant money will go to training equipment and approximately $2 million will go to the cost of construction to renovate classroom and lab spaces.
"One of our goals here is to consolidate all of our medical programs into one area of campus," Huffman said.
The school will do this by building a new 16-bed nursing assistant lab that will also have multiple simulation rooms for different aspects of the health care process. These simulation rooms could include rooms for things such as the emergency room, OBGYN/birthing and med-surg, according to Huffman.
He said the patient health care, pre-nursing and medical college prep programs all share something in common because students who participate in the programs can work toward taking a state test to be a certified nursing assistant.
So all three of these programs will use the new nursing assistant lab.
As part of the grant funds, welding students will be given a change to deepen their understanding of automation. Currently, the school has a plasma cutting table.
With the money, the school will add new robotic automation welding equipment, Huffman said.
In total the changes the grant money will fund will benefit 250 college students in the five programs and 80 to 120 students in the adult nursing assistant program every year, he said.
According to Huffman, WCCC is starting a new one year licensed practical nurse (LPN) program for adults. He believes the renovations will help prepare high school students who want to enroll in the new LPN program.
WCCC has received grants for amounts in the one hundred thousands before, but "we kind of like being in this new category of the millions," Huffman said.
Huffman said that WCCC is waiting on disbursement information for the grant and that renovations won't start until this summer at the earliest, but will most likely start in the fall.
Michelle Dillon can be reached at mdillon@newsandsentinel.com