Welding program coming to Gravette

Harley Meyers (left) and Dakota Wilmoth, both seniors at Gravette High School, repair a heat exchanger Friday in their HVAC class at the school. The class is taught by Matthew Coleman with Northwest Arkansas Community College.
Harley Meyers (left) and Dakota Wilmoth, both seniors at Gravette High School, repair a heat exchanger Friday in their HVAC class at the school. The class is taught by Matthew Coleman with Northwest Arkansas Community College.

GRAVETTE -- The School District and Northwest Technical Institute are teaming up to give more students in western Benton County a chance to learn valuable skills they could apply toward a career.

The institute plans to offer a welding program starting next fall in an old agriculture building on the district's middle school campus, the former home of Gravette High School. The mostly vacant building has separate spaces available for both lab and classroom work.

"Our plan is to just re-establish it to the way it used to be when it was an ag building," said Richard Page, Gravette's superintendent.

The institute will provide the instructor and 10 welding machines for the program. Money for those machines is coming from some General Improvement Fund dollars secured for the institute by state Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, according to Blake Robertson, the institute's president.

The institute, based in Springdale, already offers welding classes for high school students. Traveling there from western Benton County, however, takes nearly an hour.

"Our kids can't get there in a reasonable amount of time," Page said.

The Gravette-based program will be able to accommodate up to 20 students. Students from Gravette and the neighboring school districts of Decatur, Gentry and Bentonville will be invited to enroll. Bentonville already has approved adding welding technology to its curriculum for next fall.

Kathi Turner, a deputy director with the Arkansas Department of Career Education, spent time last week touring facilities in Northwest Arkansas. Her last stop in the area was Gravette, where Page led her and others from her department on a tour of the building where the welding program will be housed.

The tour continued a short walk north to the Annex Building, where Gravette High operates its heating, ventilation and air conditioning program, which is now in its second year.

"We were very impressed with what we saw," Turner said. "We're pleased schools are taking initiatives to offer more career-tech programs for their students."

The Gravette School District has submitted an application to the department to be designated a secondary career center, which would allow it to duplicate what the institute does. Another career center is warranted considering the steadily growing number of students in Northwest Arkansas, Page said.

If Gravette received that designation, the Department of Career Education would be obligated to fund it. The Legislature hasn't increased the department's budget of $20 million in about 17 years, Turner said.

"We're not able to approve new secondary career centers until our funding stream is addressed," she said.

Northwest Technical Institute offers eight programs for high school students in Springdale and some programs at five other locations. It enrolls about 250 students in those programs. Stephanie Trolinger, director of the institute's Secondary Career Center, estimated fewer than 10 percent of those students come from western Benton County.

The institute will be able to expand the welding program to Benton County because a culinary arts program it offers in partnership with Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville will not be offered next school year to high school students.

"So instead of replacing that program at NWACC, we decided to transform it into a welding program in Gravette," Robertson said.

Page said he's not certain yet how many students from each of the neighboring districts will be involved in the program. That will become clearer in the spring.

Gravette won't get any additional money for hosting the welding program, Page said. Northwest Technical Institute will get the state money it normally gets for teaching the course. Neighboring districts sending students to the program will retain all of the per-pupil state funding they normally get for those students, Page said.

"We're providing this as a benefit for our kids just by having the facility," Page said. "Our benefit is just having our kids get that education."

Survey results

The Gravette School District decided to pursue a welding program because welding rated as the top vocational interest in a recent survey of Gravette High School students. Sixty-eight percent of the students surveyed made welding their first choice. Auto collision repair was the students' second choice.

Source: Staff report

General News on 12/16/2015