A legislator from Virginia’s most affluent county — indeed, the nation’s most affluent county — said something recently that deserves more attention.
The state budget that the General Assembly just passed and has sent to the governor for her review includes a provision that authorizes George Mason University to enter into a partnership with the Danville-based Averett University to pursue certain unspecified programs. The import of this is that it allows the Northern Virginia-based GMU to plant its flag on the other end of the state and begin to establish itself as a statewide power similar to certain schools in, say, Blacksburg and Charlottesville. That’s not what caught my eye, though. Instead, it was what Del. David Reid, D-Loudoun County, who pushed the partnership, had to say about Danville: “I’m pleased GMU will now have official authorization to move forward in what is probably the most dynamic economic area of the Commonwealth.”
The italics are mine but the Loudoun legislator’s praise for Danville’s economic recovery is all his — and not hyperbole. Two of the state’s biggest jobs announcements over the past two years have come in Pittsylvania County (the Microporous battery plant with 2,015 jobs and the Avio rocket maker with 1,546 jobs). Three of the top seven have come in Southside (that brings in the Hitachi Energy plant in Halifax County that is adding 825 jobs to build power transformers). Not on that list — not yet anyway — is the Stack data center development in Pittsylvania County that has pledged to bring at least 2,500 jobs, although we haven’t heard yet how the company feels about the new data center tax in the state budget.
Whether that project materializes or not, the Danville / Pittsylvania / Halifax area has, indeed, become an epicenter for job growth. This is quite the turnaround from decades past when that part of the state was seeing its economy collapse.
That brings us to a curious omission in the state budget.
All these jobs depend on one thing — workers to fill them.
Developing the state’s workforce — making sure there are workers trained for the jobs we have or will have — has been a top priority for Virginia through the terms of governors from both parties. There have been studies upon studies documenting the skills gap between the workers available and the jobs available. To its credit, the budget just passed has multiple line items for expenditures related to “workforce development.” There’s $200,000 for the Southwest HIgher Education Center in Abingdon to develop a healthcare simulation lab. There’s $300,000 to develop an offshore wind workforce now that Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project off the coast of Virginia Beach is coming online. The Southern Virginia Higher Education Center in South Boston is slated for $500,000 to hire more instructors for “high demand” programs, such as “automation and robotics, HVAC, industrial and technical, information technology, and welding.” The Hanover Center for Trades and Technology gets $750,000. There’s $1 million to help fund more internships for college students as a way to connect them with future employers. Rockingham County is slated for $4.1 million for its career and technical education programs, following a split between Harrisonburg and Rockingham, which had previously jointly funded the Massanutten Technical Center.
I could go on — there’s more workforce money tucked away on other lines — but Gov. Abigail Spanberger can read through all 685 pages of the budget and still not find any funding for what has been one of the state’s most successful workforce training programs. That’s the Great Opportunities in Technology and Engineering Careers program, more popularly known as GO TEC. It’s a program aimed at getting middle schoolers interested in technical careers because that’s been identified as the key age when many students start paying attention to such things. This program started as a pilot program in Danville and Pittsylvania County through the Danville-based Institute for Advanced Learning and Research and has now expanded to 49 school systems across Virginia. Since GO TEC started in 2018, some 39,000 students have gone through the program. It’s hard to measure how many of those students have gone on to technical careers (and even harder to measure how many wouldn’t have without the program), but those most familiar with it consider GO TEC a success story.
Cardinal’s Danville-based reporter, Grace Mamon, recently wrote this story about GO TEC. She reported that Tyson Foods and Microporous had cited GO TEC as a factor in their decisions to locate in Danville/Pittsylvania. Four years ago, GO TEC’s director, Julie Brown, told the Southwest Virginia Economic Summit: “Come to a middle school and I’ll show you where those workers are.” When business prospects come to her region, “we take them to the middle school. We show them those young people who are diverse and getting on welding simulators. … If you want to sell a company, show ’em a sixth grade female on a welding machine out-competing her peers.”
Del. Eric Phillips, R-Henry County, called GO TEC “a valuable program that needs to be funded.”
Except now it won’t be.
GO TEC has been funded out of the GO Virginia economic development program, but that’s intended for start-up initiatives, not long-term operating funds. GO TEC had hoped to get some funding in the state budget until it can develop a long-term funding mobile from the business and philanthropic sectors.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin had included $4.67 million for GO TEC when he presented the budget back in December. Now it’s June, he’s gone and the budget that just passed has nothing. Given Virginia’s focus on workforce development, it seems odd that GO TEC wound up getting zeroed out.
Just to our south, North Carolina is growing jobs faster than all but three other states in the country. Meanwhile, Virginia is on track to lose jobs for the second year in a row — and not all of that is due to federal cutbacks. Virginia is certainly taking steps to address some of its workforce challenges. Here’s one, though, it’s stepping away from.
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