FREMONT – Bright yellow and orange sparks flew and fused thick pieces of metal Thursday night as assistant teacher Huey Ley walked through the Terra State Community College welding lab, going curtain to curtain to inspect his students’ handicrafts.
“Whirlpool. Materion. Materion. Ventra. Materion. Davis-Besse, ”Ley yelled as he pointed pointedly at his students in the lab and announced their employers.
Welding is a sought-after manufacturing occupation in the Sandusky County area and one of many craft professions taught at Terra State.
The university’s reliability as a supplier of well-trained skilled workers was called into question at the end of 2017 when some manufacturers urged the administration and board of Terra State to renew their commitment to the craft.
The President of Terra State, Ron Schumacher, took office in May 2018, initially as interim president and in November as the seventh president of the college.
The college still offers its popular Workforce Demand Scholarship, which has helped hundreds of students by paying the gap between tuition and general fees and the state and federal grants that students receive.
Terra State also purchased $ 288,000 in robotic equipment for student education and invested $ 560,000 in information technology upgrades.
In July, Terra State and the Vanguard-Sentinel Career Center announced a trail partnership on eight programs.
The programs involved are automotive technologies, business administration, criminal justice, restaurant and hospitality management, digital information technologies, engineering and robotics, health and medicine, and welding.
Schumacher said Thursday there could be an announcement soon of a planned additional partnership with Vanguard.
He said the college will find a way to become a regional workforce training and development leader in Sandusky, Seneca and surrounding counties while working on its existing relationships with manufacturers.
“It’s an ongoing process. It will take more than four months to fix problems,” said Schumacher as he sat in his office.
Employees receive additional training in the Terra lab
Ley has been a lecturer in welding at Terra State since 2016 and had nine students in his lab on Thursday night. He usually has between five and twelve students in the lab.
Kyle Schaffer has been with Ventra in Sandusky for eight years and is enrolled in Ley’s laboratory as part of an apprenticeship. It is the second grade that Schaffer has taken at Terra State.
Ley said Schaffer works in the maintenance division at Ventra and that his company wanted him to learn more skills through Terra State’s welding course.
With a welding helmet on, Schaffer described his practical training in the laboratory as a great learning experience. This was the first time that Schaffer was trained as a welder since he was of legal age.
“Maybe in eighth or ninth grade. But that was a long time ago,” said Schaffer.
Terra State makes good entry-level welders for local businesses, Ley said.
He said the college is adding a manufacturing class in the fall semester in response to local industry needs.
Since starting teaching at Terra State, Ley has seen companies come to Terra State with training or staffing needs, and the college has responded with new programs or curricula tailored to the needs of a particular company.
“I think we were definitely trying to make things easier for the local industry through the Kern Center,” said Ley.
Terra’s relationship with Vanguard
Some of Ley’s students came from the Vanguard Tech Center.
Terra State was originally called the Vanguard Technical Institute before the college changed to Terra Technical College in 1973 and then to its current name in 1994.
Vanguard-Sentinel Career Center Superintendent Greg Edinger noted the schools’ shared history on Tuesday, with Vanguard focused on providing secondary education.
Edinger described his relationship with Schumacher as very good, and the two administrators often meet.
He said the two schools had programs in the past that overlapped and taught the same things.
Edinger said he and Schumacher want to build partnerships that build on each other’s strengths.
“We view this partnership as if we shouldn’t duplicate this process,” said Edinger of the path partnership between Vanguard and Terra State.
Schumacher said in July that the Vanguard and Terra State Pathway partnership could save students $ 12,000 to $ 15,000 in tuition costs.
Starting this fall, a sophomore high school student attended courses at Vanguard and Terra State, where they received a certificate after completing their sophomore year.
As a junior, the student would continue an education in his chosen area and then be placed in a teaching program after completing the study project.
After the third year of study, a high school student obtained an associate degree at the same time as graduating from high school.
Edinger said if students started the junior or senior path, they would need to earn their associate degree after high school graduation.
He said a focus of the partnership announced in July was to provide dual enrollment for students at Vanguard and Terra State.
“You can get associate degrees and certificates before graduating from high school,” Edinger said.
Schumacher definitely wants to take inter-school collaboration to the next level, Edinger said, adding that State Representative Bill Reineke, R-Tiffin, is a big proponent of companies working together to meet staffing needs.
Terra’s future
In Terra State’s immediate future, Schumacher said he would continue to listen to manufacturers about their staffing needs, stabilize the college’s budget, and generate steady enrollment gains.
The college is well on its way this fiscal year to generate a $ 200,000 surplus to replace dollars drawn from reserves in previous years.
Terra State’s latest enrollment report on Thursday showed a headcount of 2,104 students, a number that surpassed the college’s semester goal of 2,047.
Schumacher said each of the courses within the Workforce Demand Scholarship program saw enrollment spikes, with the president citing an example of Terra State’s digital arts program, which grew from five to 22 students in one year.
Terra Faculty Association President Steve Bender has consistently urged Schumacher, former President Jerome Webster, and college board members to increase Terra State’s full-time faculties and replenish its craft labs with newer equipment.
At one point in the 1990s, the college had more than 20 full-time faculty members devoted to manufacturing and crafting in what was then Terra’s engineering division, Bender told News Messenger in December 2017.
The college only has six full-time faculties devoted to the craft trades, Bender said at the time. There are now 32 full-time teachers at the college, up from 54 at the top.
Schumacher admitted Thursday that the college will never have enough full-time employees.
He said he hoped that some of the college’s new partnerships and increased enrollments would result in more cash over the next three to five years to hire additional full-time instructors and to keep the most up-to-date equipment for Terra State’s training labs procure.
The President of the State of Terra signed a three-year contract in November.
He said he had heard a couple of times that people would wait and see to see if he could increase enrollment, tame the college’s budget, and meet staffing needs.
“My goal is to make sure that I deliver the speech,” said Schumacher.
dacarson@gannett.com
419-334-1046
Twitter: @ DanielCarson7
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