By Sukainah Abid-Kons, contributor
The plan for the Harrisonburg City Public Schools’ new career and technical education program, once the district withdraws from Massanutten Technical Center, will rely heavily on the area’s community college.
Under the initial plan, students can take courses at Blue Ridge Community College in their junior and senior years of high school. Juniors can also try different courses with exploratory options, allowing them to experiment before they commit to one program. Another benefit that Harrisonburg Schools Superintendent Michael Richards said during the school board’s Oct. 21 meeting was the possibility of transferring credits from BRCC, should a student decide to pursue a four-year degree at JMU or another university.
The city’s proposed career and technical education program will offer courses in areas such as health sciences, information technology, education, advanced manufacturing, agriculture, and business technology. The bulk of these programs will be offered through BRCC, but the board is also exploring options with local partners to try and offer students some out-of-classroom experience.
Richards added that the program design is still in development and that additional programs students might be interested in could be offered once the right partnerships have been established.
HCPS plans to initially launch the program (or at least part of it) during the 2026-2027 school year. After that, the goal is to have all the kinks worked out and the program fully up and running by summer 2027, when the city schools’ split from Massanutten Technical Center becomes complete.
The new career and technical education program will also offer the district more flexibility in tailoring its offerings to the interests of Harrisonburg students.
Through Massanutten Technical Center, programs are dictated by the interests of both county and city students. There aren’t always glaring differences between the two populations. “It’s not as if county students only like agriculture and city students only like tech,” Richards said. But sometimes programs are heavily favored by one group over the other, which means a program could get shelved or omitted if few students are interested.
Moving forward, a student who wants to take a course not offered through the city’s CTE program but that’s offered at Massanutten Technical Center, the city schools can buy seats from county in order to accommodate that.
This model is also expected to save the city a “significant” amount of money, Richards said. While the board was always happy to financially contribute to MTC’s programs regardless of the city students’ participation, the costs of providing courses for just the city are expected to be far less than the combined cost for the city and county.
All of this comes after the city school board decided earlier this year to end the district’s partnership with the county board to fund and operate Massanutten Technical Center.
After realizing that the split was imminent, Harrisonburg Schools Superintendent Michael Richards reached out to John Downey, president of Blue Ridge Community College, to see if their organizations could form a new working relationship. Downey was almost immediately on board to help continue providing education and training to the more than 200 HCPS students currently partaking in an MTC program.
“It wasn’t a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” Downey told The Citizen. “It was a matter of listening to what the need was.”
Downey said the college’s mission is to serve and support the community, so this greater partnership was a natural step, especially because the college already has many courses and program offerings to benefit high school students who wish to develop professional and technical skills through programs like pre-nursing, information technology, and education.
“[The] Career Academy is a packaging of opportunities that have always been available to students, but maybe not always packed in a way that was accessible,” said Downey, referring to the array of career-focused programs of study offered at BRCC.
Jeremy Aldrich, the city schools’ director of career and technical education, said the new program will rely on courses and opportunities already in place.
“Very early on … Blueridge Community College stepped up with great enthusiasm to say that they would like to be a part of finding a solution,” Aldrich said.
The months-long process of Harrisonburg City School Board and MTC cutting ties – and the subsequent steps of trying to figure out what comes next for the city have required a series of decisions that were not made lightly, Richard told The Citizen in an interview.
The process has also prompted the city school board and leaders to reexamine what a career and technical education program can look like and which programs are most essential to students at this moment.
“What kind of career pathways might we focus in on that would have the highest impact on our local employers?” Aldrich said, when explaining what questions the team behind the new program has been asking themselves over the past four months.
However, Richards said the program design is still in development and that additional areas of study that students might be interested in could be offered once other partnerships are established.
While the initial design of the program has been announced, there’s still work to be done. The program will need to be approved by the Harrisonburg School Board, with a few needing approval from the Virginia Department of Education, and the specifics, important details – such as curriculum, GPA requirements, and transportation – must be finalized.
“This,” Richards said, “is only the beginning.”
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