By Pat Hammert/Staff Writer

Workers at the General Motors plant will need retraining beginning next year, one of the reasons Canadian Valley Technology Center Superintendent Earl Cowan is spurring on expansion plans for the El Reno campus.

The center’s education board has approved preliminary plans for a 21,000-square-foot business and industry training center. Architects are developing a design for a building with an estimated price tag of $3 million, Cowan said.

“We want to put it on the fast track and try to finish it by the end of 2006,” he said. “We are working very closely with our engineer and construction manager because we need to move into that building a year from January.”

The building will be built on the west side of the campus seminar center at state Highway 66 and Evans Road and will feature multiple classrooms, offices, computer labs and truck and bus bays.

“We’ve needed to do this for a long time. We built one at the Chickasha campus several years ago, so its time has come,” Cowan said.

The school has saved capitol funds this year from the operating budget and will finish it out with savings from next year’s budget to pay for the project.

“There won’t be any tax increase,” he said.

Cowan said he feels a sense of urgency to expand coursework at the center. Last Friday Cowan attended an informational meeting at the Moore-Norman technology center gearing up for the retraining of several thousand GM workers in the metro area.

The company announced the Oklahoma City assembly plant is slated for closure early next year. United Auto Workers Union has a contract through mid-September 2007.

“We’ll be doing a lot of retraining for those folks, so we need this expansion right now,” he said.

Fifty-six of the GM workers who will lose their jobs live in Yukon, 12 in El Reno, 12 in Bethany, three in Piedmont, 38 in Mustang and 39 in Tuttle, besides another 203 in the western metro area and 2,000 in the Moore-Norman, eastern Oklahoma City areas.

The proposed building will help to consolidate training for students, both high school and adults, who are scattered in classrooms in various locations around the campus.

And for the first time, the technology center will implement a cosmetology program in space that is now occupied by business and industry training. Renovating that space for cosmetology students will coincide with the construction of the new building, Cowan said.

“Our sending schools have wanted cosmetology for a long time, but we had to have the facility and we felt like it was time to do it because that’s a very popular area of study,” he said. The renovated space will be large enough for a two-instructor program.

Also, preliminary plans have been discussed to add a pre-engineering program in the area left by business and industry programs, said Cowan, but that will require an outlay of funds for a chemistry laboratory.

The new construction is the first major change on the campus in more than 15 years, Cowan said. The El Reno campus just completed a front entrance upgrade for about $300,000 using its capitol funds.

Canadian County is among the top counties in population growth and any expansion to vocational technical training will improve the economy in the county, he said.

On its El Reno and Chickasha campuses, Canadian Valley serves high school and adult students in 19 communities in Canadian and Grady counties and the western metro area.

Last year, CVTC, in partnership with Mustang Schools, purchased 80 unimproved acres at 15th and Czech Hall Road for a high school campus, but construction on that project is not expected to start until 2008, Cowan said.