Moving to Danville to become part of a workforce pipeline program for the U.S. Navy was a seamless process for Rose Lopez, a veteran from Greensboro, North Carolina.
She arrived in Danville in November and was handed the keys to her River District apartment. Her service dog Gigi came with her, and her husband Javier was just about an hour away across the state line.
Lopez lived in the River District until late March, when she graduated from Danville’s Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing program, which was created by the Navy to address the country’s inadequate shipbuilding workforce.
Danville’s Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, which runs the ATDM program, made it all extremely easy, Lopez said.
“We came in, they handed us this little envelope with keys that had our address on it and we just went straight to the apartment,” she said. “The apartment was stunning, furniture was already provided. It was beautiful.”
But there’s a lot more to this process that goes on behind the scenes, and securing apartments for ATDM students isn’t as simple as it looks.
At the same time that Danville is hosting students like Lopez — hundreds of them at a time from all over the globe — the city is also experiencing a housing shortage.
ATDM began training students in 2021 and has been ramping up enrollment, with a goal of hosting between 800 and 1,000 students annually by 2025.
But the city has a deficit of about 600 homes, and while multiple housing projects are underway, it’s difficult to find accommodations for such an influx of students.
The IALR, a regional catalyst for economic transformation, works to support students coming to the city for training. The defense manufacturing program is located on the institutes’ campus in one of the city’s industrial parks.
The campus has no dedicated lodging space, although that is something that may happen in the future, said Telly Tucker, president of IALR.
“We are all aware that there is demand for housing in the market,” Tucker said. “Ideally, we’d love to have one facility large enough to put all our students in, so that we could keep them all together.”
This would help with transporting students to and from campus for training, additional tutoring and anything else they need, he said.
“But we don’t have that luxury today, so we kind of have to take what’s available,” Tucker said.
The ATDM program employs a housing coordinator who works with students and the city’s developers and real estate agents to find accommodations for these students, who often hear about the program through job fairs, advertisements or their employers.
Initially, all students got their own unit, said Debra Holley, ATDM program manager.
But around the beginning of this year, they had to start occasionally doubling up with roommates because of increases in enrollment and limited housing availability.
Most of the time, students are placed in the city’s River District, as Lopez was, although they sometimes find themselves living elsewhere throughout the city, Tucker said.
“IALR will lease a number of apartments and housing units around town and then we try to place students strategically based on whether they have their own transportation,” Tucker said.
Transportation is one of the biggest factors in placing students in housing, said Holley.
The River District is less than a 10-minute drive from the IALR campus. The program provides a bus system for students who don’t have their own cars, which is usually about 25% of each cohort.
That’s another reason on-site lodging would be helpful in the future, Tucker said.
The housing coordinator also considers demographic factors such as age, as well as what kind of training students are enrolled in.
“We try to group folks who are maybe from the same company, or if they’re doing upskilling, or if they’re pre-hire,” Tucker said. “We also look at things like age and experience level. So there’s quite a bit of criteria that goes into determining where they are housed.”
Some students bring their families with them, Tucker said, although it’s discouraged.
“We try to encourage our students to have the least amount of distraction possible,” Tucker said. “And I don’t mean distraction in a negative way, I just mean things that would take your focus away from the training, because it’s very intense.”
Students train eight hours a day, five days a week for four months, Tucker said, and Lopez added that the rigorous program is “not for the faint of heart.”
“Oftentimes, there are assignments that require their attention or review outside of class,” Tucker said. “I know we all love our families, and we all love our pets and children. But sometimes it can be a distraction from really being able to focus on the task at hand, which is doing the best you can with this training so you can get a job in the defense industrial base.”
When needed, IALR will coordinate housing for families, and take that into consideration when placing other students as well.
“If people bring their families, we would try not to place them next to an 18-year-old,” Holley said.
The program works to accommodate students during their temporary stay in Danville in other ways, too. During orientation, students learn about things to do and see around the city and meet with employees from the Danville Welcome Center.
Welcoming students to Danville is especially important because they’re coming to the city from so many different places, Tucker said.
“We’ve had students from Hawaii, California, Texas, New York,” he said. “We’ve even had students from Guam, and we recently had 10 students from Australia. So we’ve really sourced them from all over the globe.”
The program will also help with other things like connecting students with local health care providers and food banks if necessary.
Lopez heard about the ATDM program through a networking event with Paralyzed Veterans of America, and then again the next week at a Wounded Warrior Project event.
After leaving the military, Lopez worked in IT. But when she was laid off, she started looking for something with more job security, she said.
“The opportunity just sounded amazing,” she said. “I retired early out of the military medically, so I felt like I wasn’t able to complete my mission.This gives me an opportunity to get into defense manufacturing.”
Lopez chose to specialize in computer numerical control, or CNC, machining, a type of manufacturing that automates the control and movement of machine tools with computer software.
“CNC machining has the programming aspect, so it still is in my IT realm, and it’s kind of magical to have a finished component at the end of it,” she said.
CNC machining is just one of the disciplines that ATDM offers, alongside welding, non-destructive manufacturing, quality control and additive manufacturing.
Lopez and her graduating class of 59 were the 10th cohort to finish the ATDM program, and the 11th cohort is currently underway.
The cohorts are staggered and often run concurrently, which means that IALR had to figure out how to host more than one group of students at a time.
There are usually two weeks between a graduation and a new cohort coming to town, Holley said. That’s when staff will do an inspection of the apartment units and get them ready for the next round of students to move in.
Housing and tuition are entirely free to students, since the program is funded by the U.S. Navy. Students are usually not getting a salary while in the program unless they’re industry-sponsored, meaning a company has sent them to ATDM for upskilling.
“That’s another great thing about this program: everything was completely covered,” Lopez said. “Tuition, housing, any extra materials we needed, the buses to and from.”
As the program ramps up (a 100,000 square-foot facility is under construction now to prepare for the increase in students), this support will continue, Tucker said.
“There’s a lot that goes into this that many people wouldn’t assume on the surface,” he said.
There are IALR teams dedicated to working on recruiting, the admissions process, the training, student support and industry engagement. About 20 months ago, IALR had 55 employees, and today it has 114, Tucker said.
“We’ve worked tremendously to support this program over the last 18 to 20 months,” Tucker said. “There’s a lot that goes into it.”