Whitney Rigney was in sixth grade at Chatham Middle School when she fell in love with welding.
Though she used a welding simulator, rather than real equipment, Rigney said she was fascinated by the detailed, hands-on work.
The welding simulator is just one piece of equipment in a larger lab at Chatham Middle. The lab also has computer numerical controlled machinery, robotics equipment, a 3D printer and more.
Students in the GO TEC program use the equipment as they’re introduced to technical and engineering careers, often for the first time.
Rigney said that without GO TEC, she would’ve been totally unaware of career pathways in the manufacturing industry. She’s now working as a construction inspector in training with the Virginia Department of Transportation, after graduating from Chatham High School in 2025.
“If I didn’t have that in my schooling at all, I probably wouldn’t know what to do right now, and I wouldn’t be doing a job I love,” Rigney said. “I’d probably be sitting at home, because there’s really nothing else I’m interested in doing.”
Rigney’s GO TEC courses, and additional career and technical education in high school, set her up for her current job.
“Even though I didn’t choose welding as my career, and I’m in the construction field now, I see welding jobs out here and I know exactly what’s going on,” she said. “Welding really suited me, and I don’t want to sound like I have a big ego, but I was good at it.”
Rigney is one of 39,000 students that GO TEC — which stands for Great Opportunities in Technology and Engineering Careers — has reached since it was piloted in Pittsylvania County and Danville in 2018. Since then, it’s expanded to 49 school divisions across the state, funded primarily by grants from GO Virginia, a statewide economic development effort.
Economic development and industry officials say it’s been instrumental in attracting business to Virginia.
But now its future is in question.
GO TEC’s current GO Virginia grant expires at the end of the month, and program leaders had asked the General Assembly for two years of funding to keep things running while they implement a self-sustainability plan.
Over the weekend, they got bad news from Richmond: The budget plan that legislators are expected to vote on on Monday includes no money for GO TEC, despite an appropriation in an earlier House of Delegates version of the spending plan.
“We are deeply appreciative of the Commonwealth’s support over the years for the establishment and expansion of the Great Opportunities in Technology and Engineering Careers (GO TEC) program — one that we feel confident is helping to differentiate our state as a leader in talent development,” Melanie Lewis, vice president of advanced learning at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, said in a statement Sunday. The Danville institute spearheads the GO TEC program.
“While we are disappointed that the latest state budget proposal defers funding for GO TEC, our hope is that our Virginia partners can continue to help us identify bridge funding solutions as we implement our two-year business and sustainability plan,” she said. “Maintaining the momentum and tremendous impact of GO TEC moving forward is critical — particularly in rural school divisions — to shift applied learning earlier in the pipeline and to allow for more advanced skills to be added later in the academic path.
“Economic development wins and opportunities for our youth depend on the future of this program.”
GO TEC leaders say stopgap funding from other grants and participating school systems will keep the program afloat until the end of the year.
From 1,500 students a year to 11,000: GO TEC’s growth and impact
GO TEC began during the 2018-2019 school year in three middle schools in Danville and Pittsylvania, with the goal to develop interest in manufacturing careers among students.
The program provides hands-on experience in nine focus areas: automation and robotics, IT coding and networking, manufacturing engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, precision machining, healthcare, metrology and welding.
Middle schools that participate have an in-house GO TEC lab with different types of manufacturing equipment for the students to learn about and interact with, like a welding simulator, a computer numerical control machine, a 3D printer, a laser cutter and hydroponic equipment.
The idea is to introduce middle schoolers to manufacturing skills, equipment and, ultimately, careers.
This early introduction is meant to make students aware of these career pathways in time to pursue them, Lewis said in an interview before the budget news broke.
“By the time they’re in high school they may have already made the decision on what career path they want to pursue,” Lewis said. “It’s very critical for us to hit them in sixth to eighth grade, so they’re exposed to these careers and as they move into high school, they can continue to take those courses.”
And it’s not just a school program, Lewis said. GO TEC is a talent pipeline strategy for Virginia’s workforce.
“Our mission is economic transformation, and we want to be able to put students in that pipeline for economic transformation,” she said.
In the six years since it was established, GO TEC has expanded to reach almost 50 Virginia school divisions, in Southwest, Southside, Central Virginia, the Hampton Roads area and even the Eastern Shore.
In Southside especially, GO TEC has helped entice manufacturers to locate in the area, according to Lewis and Allison Moore, communications director for IALR.
Tyson Foods, which opened in Danville in 2023, and Microporous, a lithium-ion battery separator manufacturer that announced a facility in Danville in 2024, cited GO TEC as a factor in their decision to locate in the region, Moore said.
“When we have economic development prospects, the GO TEC lab [at IALR] is very much part of the tour,” Moore said. “They are very excited to see the talent, and one of the largest differentiators in our region is the talent pool.”
Prospective companies like to see a talent pipeline that they can scale, she said.
This has been the case for Hitachi Energy in Halifax County too, said Rebecca Saunders, training and development leader for the company.
Hitachi, which manufactures electrical power transformers, has hired around 50 GO TEC graduates for both hourly and salaried positions, Saunders said. The facility has about 900 employees total.
GO TEC graduates are good candidates because they’ve had hands-on experience with equipment from a young age, and they’ve been taught how to problem solve, Saunders said.
“Sometimes the school system is focused on things that the Department of Education says students need, and it might not align with what we currently need in our factories,” she said. “GO TEC took the time to understand what the needs were in our area and really create those modules to give students experience.”
Saunders worries that the end of the GO TEC program would be “just another unnecessary hardship” for Southside Virginia. When Hitachi is recruiting for engineering or higher-level management positions, the first thing prospects do is look at the school system, she said.
“We try so hard in rural areas to compete,” she said. “You don’t have people knocking down the doors to move to South Boston, Virginia, when you’re an hour and a half from Raleigh. … When we have programs like GO TEC, we show that we can compete.”
Loss of funding would mean more cost to school divisions
Without the GO TEC program, the shortages in the manufacturing labor pool will only grow, said Mark Gosney, a retired manager at Comfort Systems, an air conditioning contractor in Southside and a current Halifax County School Board member.
Gosney saw the workforce gap firsthand when he worked at Comfort Systems, he said.
“We don’t have enough tradespeople,” he said. “And when you cut off the initial growth with GO TEC at the middle school level, you severely impact the ability of children to get exposed [to those careers].”
Career and technical education at the high school level begins in 11th grade in Halifax County, he said, so “when you cut that first step out, at least in Halifax County, you bump it back to an 11th grader, and at that point, their path is pretty much already chosen.”
GO TEC has received a total of $14.85 million in grant awards from GO Virginia since the program’s inception, Moore said. Of that, $9.02 million went to IALR for program startup, capital, administrative and operational costs, including outfitting a mobile lab, four teacher training labs and 18 middle school labs.
IALR had asked the state for about $7.7 million per year for the next two fiscal years, which would have allowed it to serve every middle school in Virginia. It costs about $150,000 to set up a new lab at a middle school.
GO TEC had planned to expand this upcoming school year, creating 39 new labs. The year after that, the program would have added 41 more.
An earlier version of the House budget had included an appropriation of $2.32 million per year for two years. (The state Senate had not recommended any funding for GO TEC.)
That level of funding would decrease the program’s reach from 349 schools to 150 schools, Moore said, and would increase the cost to participating schools by about 40%. School divisions currently pay $16,000 for a two-year commitment.
IALR leadership has been in touch with legislators, and some of them have visited GO TEC labs, Lewis said.
Prior to the weekend’s budget news, Moore and Lewis had said the rationale behind the funding recommendation, as they understood it, was to push GO TEC to be self-sustaining.
“I don’t want to speak on behalf of [legislators], but some of the reasonings that we have heard is that they wanted to see that we can sustain the program on our own, and they wanted the school systems to take a more active role in financing the GO TEC program,” Lewis said.
Del. Eric Phillips, R-Henry County, said before the final budget plan was released that GO TEC is “a valuable program that needs to be funded.”
However, GO Virginia grants are meant to kickstart programs, not fund their continuing operations, he said.
“They’ve come to the end of that startup funding, and now they need to get to the point of self-sustainability,” he said. “I think we need to figure out a way for them to get the funding to do that, because GO TEC is a key cog in economic development.”
The program’s self-sustainability plan includes potential cost-sharing with the private sector, philanthropic donations and obtaining licensing to sell the curriculum outside of Virginia, while keeping the state’s competitive edge, Lewis said.
“But again, that would take us two years to fully implement, and we need to have the funding to do that, to scale up our team and put these different strategies into place,” she said.
