EL PASO COUNTY — Across 87 acres of sprawling fields near Colorado Springs, a group of Colorado superintendents is setting out to revive schooling in the trades and expand students’ options beyond college — preparing them for jobs in industries battling steep workforce shortages and even training kids interested in construction to one day build affordable teacher housing close by.
It’s all part of a plan that education leaders who belong to the Pikes Peak Board of Cooperative Educational Services have been dreaming up for the past four years, motivated by a resurgence in career and technical education, or CTE, and a growing need for skilled employees among local companies.
The Pikes Peak BOCES — which provides support, staffing and resources to nine rural districts and 12 bigger districts and other school agencies — is in the early stages of creating what it calls the Pikes Peak BOCES Education Park. It will be a kind of CTE campus where regional students will have new opportunities to explore what it takes to pursue well-paying careers in a range of fields that don’t require a college degree: construction trades, firefighting, veterinary training, food services and culinary arts, cybersecurity, horticulture science, meat sciences and medical services.
The budding CTE hub helps answer one thorny question weighing on districts, students and business owners: What will it take to build up the state’s future pipeline of workers and connect kids with meaningful careers?
“The pendulum is starting to shift in Colorado to the point that our kids, especially our rural kids, are saying, ‘Hey, college isn’t really working for me,’” said Pat Bershinsky, executive director of the Pikes Peak BOCES.
He noted that more parents are also steering their kids toward vocational careers and certification programs.
“I think it’s prime for us to do something like this,” Bershinsky said.
The central CTE park will give rural school districts a better footing to expand the kinds of programs they can offer their students, particularly as smaller remote districts often struggle to find qualified CTE teachers willing to instruct students — teachers whom Bershinsky calls “unicorns.” Those same districts also tend to have a hard time piecing together the funding needed for extra CTE programs, he said.
The park will allow districts to share CTE teachers and pool their funding at a time “there’s just this huge need, especially on the backside of COVID, for skilled workers,” he said.
Bershinsky kick-started the project by purchasing 87 acres with $870,000 the BOCES gained after selling a school building back to Calhan School District RJ-1 and also securing a $2 million Rural Coaction Program grant distributed by the Colorado Department of Education. Those funds have helped set planning in motion, including by sending superintendents to scout out vocational facilities in Cherry Creek as well as Las Vegas and Stillwater, Oklahoma, by hiring architects to design an initial layout for the park and by conducting water studies.
Bershinsky hopes to break ground on the park sometime early next year, focusing first on a centralized water facility and one building that would house construction trades along with a 911 dispatch training center and a cybersecurity training center. The cost for the initial infrastructure, water facility and first building is an estimated $14 million.
This site plan for the Pikes Peak BOCES Education Park — which education leaders hope to break ground on early next year — shows the variety of industries students could explore on the campus, including construction trades, firefighting, food services and culinary arts, and cybersecurity. (Provided by the Pikes Peak BOCES)
Bringing the campus to life will require more money, which is why Bershinsky said he plans to apply for an Opportunity Now Colorado grant through a state program that helps fund the rollout and expansion of workforce development initiatives.
He has also pinpointed another potential revenue stream: selling water from the park’s centralized water facility to a nearby 400-home development awaiting construction.
He’s eager to get shovels into the ground.
“Every year that passes that we can’t (start building),” Bershinsky said, “we’re just missing another group of seniors that could benefit.”
Workforce shortages are only worsening but perceptions of CTE careers are changing
For now, districts that are part of the Pikes Peak BOCES are starting to scale up their own CTE programs that will eventually feed into the education park. Ellicott School District 22 earlier this school year partnered with a local union of plumbers, pipefitters and HVAC technicians to introduce a pre-apprenticeship program through which students can learn plumbing, sheet metal fabrication and welding skills.
Meanwhile, high schoolers from a handful of Colorado Springs-area districts have begun learning how to answer emergency phone calls while studying how to become 911 dispatchers.
And in August, Miami-Yoder School District 60-JT — a district of more than 400 students in preschool through 12th grade in Rush — will launch a program instructing kids how to operate heavy equipment, starting them on a four-year apprenticeship so that they can knock out one year while still in high school.
Students who attend Miami-Yoder School District are scattered across 420 square miles in three counties without much of a city nearby. Rush has a church, a café, a post office, a food pantry and a part-time mechanic.
Despite sitting in an isolated part of Colorado, the district prioritizes six CTE programs within its one school building, said Superintendent Dwight Barnes, and almost half the district’s teaching staff focus on CTE. The district also shuttles students to Pikes Peak State College for a half day of learning CTE skills and working toward certifications in fields like welding and catering.
Barnes has been lucky in retaining most of his CTE instructors, who specialize in agriculture, criminal justice, information technology, family and consumer sciences, audio production and graphic design. Finding educators is the biggest challenge district leaders face in building CTE programs, he said.
But he and his staff have had to devise ways to round out their students’ classes with work-based learning opportunities. Audio production students, for example, help set up and get equipment rolling for school events while catering students have assisted in the school kitchen.
“We try to be creative here because it’s all I have,” Barnes said. “There’s nothing around.”
That’s why the education park appeals to him. Students can hop on a bus and travel 35 minutes to spend a half day of school at the park, gaining confidence in their CTE skills and applying those skills in a work-based setting so that “they’ve been able to experience that job before they ever go out (to an employer) at 18,” Barnes said.
“It puts everything right there together,” he said.
Bershinsky sees promise in also opening up the education park to students from the BOCES’ School of Excellence, which educates kids who have significant special needs and kids who struggle with behavioral challenges. Often, those students run into limited options to train for a job that would allow them to make a living after high school, Bershinsky said. He plans to relocate that school to a new building right on the CTE campus.
“Our kids in this building could benefit from these programs,” he said. “My kids don’t get the same opportunity as other kids in other districts, and the reason why is that kid comes with a behavior or comes with a disability and if they try to get into some of these vocational programs, they’re turned away.”
And once some of the trades programs are more established at the CTE hub, Bershinsky envisions that students learning construction will be able to walk to the east side of the property and put their skills to work by helping build affordable housing for teachers and school district staff.
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It’s one way to make a dent in the astounding workforce shortages overtaking Colorado’s construction industry, which will have an estimated 45,000 jobs to fill by 2027, according to data from the nonprofit Construction Education Foundation.
“Clearly, there’s no pipeline really with enough people to fill those positions,” said Tony Milo, president and CEO of the Colorado Contractors Association. “We’ve had a shortage for the last few years, and it’s only getting worse.”
That shortage has largely been fueled by increased investment in infrastructure in Colorado and nationally, Milo said, noting, “we don’t have an increase in workers so that’s exacerbating the workforce shortage problem.”
Schools haven’t necessarily helped produce more construction workers in the past 20 years, he added, but that’s slowly changing — along with perceptions of pursuing construction as a career.
“Now with college debt continuing to skyrocket and continuing to be an issue,” Milo said, “people are starting to open their eyes to other opportunities that don’t incur college debt, and construction is really one of those careers.”
Still, he anticipates it will take a decade to build an adequate pipeline of construction workers across the country as baby boomers retire “at a rapid pace.”
That means that construction companies will continue struggling to grow and take on more projects while the state will continue facing challenges with finding enough workers to maintain roads, bridges and transportation systems.
“That’s why it’s really important for us to invest in these CTE programs,” Milo said, “and really help train and expose young people to the many great careers that are available in the industry.”