Charles City’s NIACC Career Center groundbreaking set for Friday

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

A groundbreaking has been planned Friday morning, April 14, for the new NIACC Career Center, which will offer technical education for students from seven area high schools including Charles City.

Dr. Steven Schulz, North Iowa Area Community College president, was the guest speaker at a recent Charles City Rotary Club meeting and gave an update on the project, which has been in the works since January 2021.

Although this is the second career center to be established by NIACC – the first being in Forest City, which began accepting high school students in the fall of 2021 – this is the first to not only include multiple high schools, but also several community college districts, he said.

“What makes it unique is there’s seven school districts from three community college territories,” Schulz said. The community school districts, in addition to Charles City, are Riceville, Osage, Nashua-Plainfield, Clarksville, North Butler and Rudd-Rockford-Marble Rock.

The community colleges are NIACC, Northeast Iowa Community College and Hawkeye Community College.

Schulz said community colleges are usually “pretty parochial.”

“We don’t leave our territory without permission from the other community colleges, so there’s lots of people to thank” for making the Charles City career center idea work, he said.

The career center will be created at the current NIACC Center in downtown Charles City, at 203 Brantingham St. The center had originally been planned for new construction at the Floyd County Fairgrounds, but rising construction costs forced a change to look for repurposing an existing building.

Bids were let on the downtown building project in February, and Woodruff Construction LLC of Waterloo submitted the winning low bid of $4.784 million. The Charles City Council agreed to essentially give NIACC the part of the city-owned parking lot south of the existing building to expand into.

“What we’ll be doing is renovating the existing center, and adding about 9,500 square feet to the south end,” Schulz said. The construction project will include work throughout the existing building, including a new electrical system.

“Actually, the longest part of the project is waiting for the new transformer to get here. It’s a year out,” Schulz said.

The construction timetable calls for the Charles City project to be completed in March 2024, and Schulz said they will begin to use the remodeled building immediately, but the high school career center classes won’t start until the new school year begins in the fall of 2024.

The career center will offer classes to mostly seniors from the seven participating high schools in four “career academy” subject areas: advanced manufacturing, construction, information technology and health care.

“We picked those based on Iowa Workforce Development’s job openings reports in this region of the NIACC territory,” Schulz said. “Those were the four largest job openings in the area. So we’re really trying to feed the workforce to meet the needs of this part of our district.”

He said the same four subject areas had earlier also been identified for the Forest City career center.

“We will have 25 seats in each one of those ‘academies,’ as I call them,” Schulz said. “Those will be designated by enrollment numbers from each school. We charge so much a seat for students to participate in that,” he said.

Although designed for seniors, the seats could be opened up to juniors or even community members if they are not filled by seniors in the school district, Schulz said. The goal is to have every seat filled.

Each school district committed to at least 10 years as part of the program. The payments from the school districts will come through student supplemental funding and other sources, but the districts will have to pitch in some extra funds as well.

“There’s a little gap that the school will have to fill, because these are expensive programs. It’ll be about $3,200 per seat for a year. And then there will be ongoing expenses that each school district will contribute to the upkeep and maintenance of equipment, along with NIACC,” he said.

There will be no cost to students to participate in the program.

“When we created this contract with the schools, we decided that we were going to include all the costs for the students. So students and parents don’t pay any tuition. And if you’re in the construction program you’re going to get a full tool belt to use while you’re there, unless you want to buy your own. We’re going to provide all that,” he said.

“It’s a really great community program, and when we think about rural Iowa this is exactly what we ought to be doing, is trying to work together with our communities to support and keep students here,” Schulz said. “The whole idea is to train them here, they transfer to NIACC or some other community college. We never let them get away from our communities and we can fill those jobs.”

In addition to the classroom work and hands-on training at the career center, there are internships, apprenticeships and workplace learning built into the program as well, Schulz said.

“So students will get a chance to spend time in the businesses here and see what opportunities there are, all the way from entry level to running equipment,” he said. “It’s an exciting time and I couldn’t be more thrilled to kick this off here.”

Schulz said one question that often comes up is what NIACC will do in the meantime “while we’re tearing the building apart.”

“We’re still looking for a location in town, somewhere in the downtown area. We’ve got a couple of leads, that we can continue to have an office there. We may have to schedule some continuing ed courses in other facilities, but we only have to do that for eight or nine months, and we’re just going to have to make it work. But we would like to have an office front so that we can be there for the citizens of the community,” he said.

“This isn’t about NIACC,” Schulz said. “This is about Charles City. This is about Floyd County and north Iowa. We’re just lucky we got to be a partner in it. That’s pretty special and you should be proud of your community and I’m proud to work for this, and I just want to say thanks for all your support of this thus far. We look forward to kicking this off.”

The groundbreaking is planned for 10:30 a.m. Friday at the NIACC Center in downtown Charles City.