SALYERSVILLE – The vocational trade school that is set to relocate to the industrial park may be coming to Magoffin much sooner than expected.
At the recent SOAR Summit, TEK Center received nearly $3.2 million for the engineering, design and site prep of the expansion at the Gifford Industrial Park, and combined with more than $1 million the Magoffin County government has already secured to prep the site, which has given them a great head start to get the ball rolling on the relocation, but now they are looking for a temporary site.
Angelina Reynolds, president and founder of the TEK Center, met with Magoffin County Judge-Executive Matthew Wireman this week to discuss where they could locate temporarily.
TEK Center has had a 50% increase in enrollment from last, with plans to start with 200 students when they open the local location, with plans to grow to 400 students.
“Some of our students are working in local businesses,” Reynolds said. “We’ve had students go to work for the plumbing guys, Clog Busterz out of Johnson County. We had a student who is working for Drains Unlimited as a heavy equipment mechanic after taking our industrial mechanic pathway. I have one now that is the first hire for Affinity Design and Construction, the new company going in at Langley, who will be trained to be a pipe welder, and we have students who are working at 23 Repair that graduated in industrial mechanics. I have two heavy equipment students working for Adams Contracting in Tennessee, so they’re definitely able to take the training they have here and utilize it otherwise.”
Reynolds said the education students receive through the TEK Center is top-of-the-line.
“I have one student who works for Boyd Asphalt, took the heavy equipment program, and three months he’s able to do GPS surveying that they company owner couldn’t do,” Reynolds said. “So I think the training and utilizing the industry-developed curriculum that we have is really benefiting these students and putting them at a new level when they hit the workforce.”
“We are a vocational college,” Reynolds explained. “We offer electrical, industrial mechanics, plumbing, heavy equipment operation, masonry and welding. Nationally accredited certifications that are completed in less than one year. This is our second year in operation, and we are in full swing with our second cohort. We had a 40% increase in enrollment this year over last year and we had a 65% graduation rate last year. Twenty of the 27 graduates are currently working, so I would call that a successful operation. This year we have added a couple other pathways. We added masonry and welding to what we offer, and we have probably 56 students enrolled this year. We are currently already issuing core and level 1 certifications.”
Even more impressive, the education is covered by many different scholarship opportunities, making it free – if not mostly free – for most students.
“For our students, if you are eligible for WIO, which is the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act, most students around here can do so, but we do offer those scholarships in partnership with EKCEP and Big Sandy Community Action, that they will cover $7,000 of the $10,000 tuition,” Reynolds said.
While the Gifford Industrial Park location will not be ready for a couple of years, Reynolds said they’re ready to make the move here sooner than that.
“At the 2024 SOAR Summit, we were awarded $3.18 million through the Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization Grant, it will allow us to do site development, engineering, design and administration phase of this project to build a 30,000 square foot campus at the Gifford Road Industrial Park.”
While they hope to hit the ground running in Magoffin, planning to expand their curriculum to carpentry and HVAC, Reynolds said they are looking to expand to more programs as soon as possible.
“We know Magoffin County is a trade county,” Reynolds said. “There’s a lot of union workers here, and a lot of the trades we’re offering at TEK Center leads directly into those unionized jobs.”
She said their programs can help students who may not be suited to college.
“Now is the time for those students who work with their hands and maybe aren’t traditional college students to take a look at the TEK Center and see if we can’t help you get into a career within a year’s time that you can viably sustain your family no matter where you are, whether it’s in Eastern Kentucky, across the state of Kentucky, or anywhere in the U.S.”
No matter which pathway chosen, the tuition is $10,000, but they have partners that cover 70% of that, and then other partners that will cover additional costs, potentially covering 100% of the costs.
Judge Wireman said they are ready to proceed with filling up the industrial park.
“We got an Abandoned Mine Lands Grant in September ’22,” Wireman explained. “It had to go through a vetting process, and that’s required on all AMLER grants and that makes sure it’s ready to go. That process took longer than I was expecting, almost a year. Once we got that last fall, we have to get through the request for proposal process to get an engineering firm to do the design work. After a couple of tries doing the proper advertising and all that, we finally have an engineering firm on board. The design work is in progress. Basically, what that’s going to do is allow us to bid this project out, along with Big Sandy ADD, and the project is going to run gravity-feed sewer along the perimeter of the industrial park, do soil sampling and testing to meet all the geo-tech standards, and then it will have preparations for a 50,000 square foot facility. What we’re looking at with the TEK Center, we have one possible tenant for the middle track. Five acres on each end is already sold, one to Emerald Energy, and one to TEK Center. The group that’s looking at the middle track needs about 25,000 square feet. TEK Center needs about 25-30,000, so in the design phase we’re looking at splitting up that 50,000 track and this will expedite the TEK Center building their school.”
Emerald Energy has its design phase ready to go whenever the sewer and soil testing completed.
Reynolds and Wireman also talked about relocating TEK Center’s operations to Magoffin County sooner, with Reynolds looking at the community center as a temporary headquarters while the industrial park site is built.
More information about TEK Center can be found at https://www.tekcenterky.org/ and on social media.
