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| High Tech Solution to Low Paying Jobs |
| Bill Hudson | 10/6/09 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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Dr. Don Goodwin, the director of the Archuleta County Education Center, has an expansive view of Pagosa’s educational and economic future — but I sometimes wonder if he feels like a mountain climber, standing at the base of Mount Everest, trying to convince the Nepalese sherpas that the ascent really makes sense.
At the end of September, Goodwin gathered a roomful of Archuleta County’s “movers and shakers” for a presentation at the Ross Aragon Community Center, a presentation that emulated the type of meetings happening in executive board rooms of big multi-national corporations every day — but which probably has never happened before in the little rural town of Pagosa Springs. A team of sales and technology specialists from Tandberg, the same company that made your uncle’s reel-to-reel tape player back in the 1960s, had set up the South Conference Room with some rather ordinary looking electronics: a rotating “security camera” type device mounted atop a large, flat-panel video screen, an ordinary laptop computer, and a fancy remote control in the hands of one of the tech guys. Continued...
Dr. Don Goodwin of the Archuleta County Education Center warms up the crowd for the upcoming presentation by the Tandberg sales team.
Tandberg grants program coordinator Casey Rossetti appeared in person. Quantified Consulting grants writer Karla Sartin appeared via video. |
Amazingly, the large-screen teleconferencing actually functioned reasonably well, considering the tech guys had simply plugged in to the Community Center’s shared Internet wiring.
But the most fascinating piece in the one-hour presentation was not the hardware or the way it functioned — but rather the way a big-name technology provider, Tandberg, is working with local educational institutions, law enforcement departments and healthcare providers, to leverage grants through the federal government’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
Don Goodwin has spend much of his life in higher education settings, and he and the Education Center board and staff have taken on the challenge of providing Archuleta County with a broad range of educational opportunities — despite of our rural isolation, tucked away as we are in the mountains four hours from the nearest major city.
“My staff and I have talked a lot about how we can bring content to Pagosa Springs,” Goodwin began his introduction, noting that Archuleta County does not have the population to warrant a community college. “Our solution is to use the technology — it’s very sophisticated right now — and let us create a network where we can link up with any type of [educational] content and bring that content to Pagosa Springs.”
Over the past several decades, a democratic shift took place as Pagosa Springs — along with many rural towns in the West — has slowly made the conversion from a ranching, timbering economy to a resort and retirement community: the more challenging, better paying jobs that young adults can find in bigger cities never arrived here. Now, in 2009, Archuleta County has not much to offer, in terms of careers, to 20- and 30-something adults. Many of the jobs here are in the hospitality industry: cleaning rooms, leading tours, taking reservations, bagging groceries. Oh, we have amazing recreational opportunities, that’s for sure, but not every young family can support itself on a ski instructor’s commission.
Few of the jobs a young adult can find here appear to have a great deal of career potential — and increasingly, those jobs are being taken by the “formerly retired” who now find themselves having to re-join the workforce for economic reasons.
Nor do we have easy access to college level instruction here — in part, just exactly because of our shortage of young adults. Our high school graduates head off to Fort Lewis in Durango or other schools farther away, and many never return to share what they’ve learned.
 So the Archuleta County Education Center is trying to go beyond simply providing Microsoft Word classes. If Goodwin has his way, we will one day have full-blown access — via teleconferencing technology — to not only college-level academic content, but also to training for the hospitality industry, and any other industry that might be looking at Archuleta County as a possible landing place.
The idea seems to be: train the workforce, and they will come. Provide trained workers and additional industries will find Archuleta County more attractive. Provide more industries and maybe some of our young adults can find good paying jobs here.
Don Goodwin had publicly rolled this idea out back in September of 2008, with a similar presentation by some folks from Cisco Systems, showing off a “TelePresence” concept — albeit only a Powerpoint presentation, and minus the functioning teleconferencing setup. That potential project ran afoul of its $250,000 price tag.
But as the sales and technology folks from Tandberg — who appeared both in person and via the large screen TV — unfolded their plan to help the Education Center achieve its goals, the story took an interesting turn. It appears that considerable ARRA funds are available to isolated communities who need to train or re-train their labor pool. The hospitality industry is one of those targeted by these Department of Labor grants.
As we heard it explained, the Tandberg’s Grant Services Team will write the grant (on the Education Center’s behalf) to provide the Education Center with a teleconferencing setup. The grant itself would be aimed at training our hospitality workforce to make the workers more “upwardly mobile.” But once in place, the teleconferencing setup could also be used for college classes and other training — as well as for the Education Center’s proposed drop-out recovery Charter School.
The successful grant would, of course, be used to purchase new teleconferencing hardware and software from Tandberg.
You can learn more about Tandberg’s grant writing program at their website.
http://www.tandberg.com/services/video-conferencing-federal-government-grant-services.jsp
Goodwin introduced Casey Rossetti as Tandberg’s point man for the grant writing program, and Rossetti explained why so many local and regional leaders had been invited to the presentation.
“When we do a grant, we can absolutely write it and put all of the pieces together, but it takes a tremendous flow of information from all the stakeholders, all the folks in the room, to gather the stories that are pertinent to the grant. But we try to handle a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting the grant ready to submit to the feds.”
Near the end of a fascinating presentation, County commissioner John Ranson asked the on-screen grant writer — Karla Sartin of Quantified Consulting — if it would help sharing with the Department of Labor the economic situation in Archuleta County. Continued...
The room was full of 'stakeholders' from various county and regional agencies. Curiously enough, I couldn't locate a single representative from the Town of Pagosa Springs. |
“Does it give you extra points, or does it help being an economically distressed county? Does that help in the grant process?” Ranson asked.
“I would say, yes,” responded Sartin. “The ‘Needs’ section of the grant, I call it the ‘Cry Me a River’ portion. Any kind of ‘badness’ you have (audience laughter) — y’all will get used to me — anything in terms of ‘badness’ that you can highlight, we can use that. I call it ‘Cry Me a River, Build Me a Dam.’ The feds are going to help you build a dam.”
I will say, that is the first time I’ve been asked to visualize the movement of young adults away from Pagosa Springs as a ‘river’ — but it will be fascinating to see if a collaboration between a small rural education center, a multi-national technology company, and a barrel full of federal dollars can build a dam large enough to change the demographics — and the economy — in Pagosa Springs.
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