(Spirit Lake)– A ribbon cutting ceremony was held this afternoon for the Spirit Lake Regional Career Academy at the Spirit Lake campus of Iowa Lakes Community College. College President Scott Stokes says it will offer high-demand programs to high school students from Okoboji, Harris-Lake Park, Spirit Lake and Estherville-Lincoln Central. Stokes says it allow those students to earn high school and college credits in the areas of Agribusiness Technology, Electrical Technology, Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning Technology, Certified Nursing Assistant and Patient Care…
”So I would say we’ve been working with our area high schools in this area for quite some time trying to figure out a way to have a career academy like this and with the funding that the state was offering with grants it was really a good opportunity for us to kind of take some of the ideas that we had talked about with our area high schools and move those forward so then it was really, you know, High School Partnerships Department working with our area high schools on what their needs were so we could write that into a proposal grant and then move forward with getting this. So we were super excited when we found out we were going to receive this money so we could outfit this campus to meet the needs of our career academy. So we’re really excited. It turned out fabulous.”
The $1 million in funding for the academy was made possible by grant ILCC received in 2021 from the Iowa Department of Education’s Career Academy Incentive Fund. Stokes says most of the career academy programs will get geared up in the fall…
“We have the Health Academy going on this spring and then next fall we’ll start with the Ag and we are also going to have HVAC in here as well, so we’ve got the health lab and everything ready to go. There was a delay on some of the equipment in some of our other areas so we started kind of a soft open for the academy with our health programs and then the other programs are going to kind of get ramped up and going in the fall.”
Stokes says they’re also grateful to a number of area businesses and industries, who also gave input and donated equipment to the academy.
