For several years now, the CTE department has found there to be a consistent rise in student interest, but a shortage of space for those students in the classrooms. To combat this steadily increasing issue, CCHS has been in the process of building a new addition since the beginning of 2024 to give students more space, but also a better environment to learn in. 

Dallas Terry, CTE department chair and educator, claimed that some classes like welding “would not have been something we could even think about offering without the expansion,” which would be crazy to think about considering it has one of the higher levels of interest upon students. Another issue Terry brought up was that even though “Our nursing program has made it great, it’s literally a standard classroom,” meaning even though we’ve had great success, it’s not an ideal learning environment for our nursing students. 

With this extra addition in space for the CTE department, not only will we have more space to teach and learn, but also more space for necessities. Necessities such as handwashing stations and closer bathrooms have been absent from most of the CTE classrooms for the department’s history of being a department. Now with this expansion, we can expect to see those closer bathrooms right outside the classrooms, along with a handwashing station in almost each new room. We can expect to see classes such as welding, nursing, cosmetology, indoor + outdoor carpentry, and architecture and design moving into the expansion. Don’t worry, those classrooms will not be empty for very long. Each old classroom will be repurposed and maintained for continuous use whenever it’s needed throughout the day. 

You might wonder how this expansion is funded, well, I did too. I asked Terry how this expansion has been, and will continue to be funded. “About two thirds of the funds for this expansion are coming from our esser [Covid] funds, and the rest of it through our sales tax revenue we get to put towards our facilities. Our equipment and tools are paid for through Perkins [Federal] Funding, along with CTI [State] grants” Terry replied. He also mentioned that in order for the school to afford all of the equipment and tools, he has had to purchase them across the last three years in order to meet requirements. 

Though it might sound like it’s been going smoothly, it’s been a battle with all the contractors to stay making steady progress. Altercations between some different contractors and companies early on ended up delaying building progress quite a bit. The result of this is a push back of the completion date, which one could say limits the students’ learning capabilities. Through the contractor delays, weather delays, and any other random delays, we can still expect to be learning in this new expansion by January, after winter break, or the beginning of the second semester this school year. This new expansion should be a great attention getter for incoming freshman to learn more about CTE offerings, which would boost enrollment even more.