For six years, the Carroll County school system has been working with West Georgia Technical College to create a College and Career Academy that would provide students with a high school diploma and the skills to find an entry level job in the health care industry.

The charter school, the vision of Superintendent John Zauner, will soon become reality as construction begins on the new campus of the academy with the help of a $3 million grant approved last week by the Technical College System of Georgia.

“At the core of the career academy is the concept of dual enrollment for secondary students,” said Cindy Clanton, director of Career and Technical Education for the school system. “Students will be able to receive high school credit for graduation and technical college credit at the same time.”

The concept has been put to the test in Newnan, which partnered with WGTC 10 years ago to create the Central Educational Center.

“We were the first of these in the state of Georgia,” said Mark Whitlock, CEO of the center.

The academy is all about student achievement. In the 10 years since the career academy was created in Newnan, the annual dropout rate in grades 9 through 12 in Coweta County has dropped to half of what it was, from 6.7 percent to around 3 percent today, he said.

“We’re not the only thing that our school system has done about that, but we’re the biggest single thing the school system has done,” Whitlock said.

This year the Coweta County Central Educational Center has 1,340 high school students enrolled. One out of every two graduates from the school system have studied at CEC.

Yet the career academy can’t keep up with demand. Enrollment has grown 32 percent over the last three years, Whitlock said. The school has waiting lists and the new Douglas County College and Career Institute, which opened this fall, is already compiling waiting lists for some of its 15 programs next semester.

Mandy Johnson, director of high school programs at the Douglas CCI, said the school has 160 students this semester and didn’t have to turn any students away, but now that students are learning about the school some of its programs are filled to capacity with students still trying to enroll.

One of the advantages of the career academy model is that students have an opportunity to sample a variety of industries, so they can make an informed career decision.

“It’s of course very costly for students today to go to post-secondary education without knowing what they want to focus on, what they want to major in,” Whitlock said.

At the same time, industries are requiring higher skill sets to earn a living wage, often a higher skill set than can be earned in a traditional high school. The career academy can act as a bridge between the working world and the local industries by creating a partnership between the college, the high school and the local industry. It gives employers the means to communicate what they need in the labor force to the schools that are training future employees. It also helps students, allowing them to learn the skills necessary to work in the well-paying jobs available locally.

“Our long-term goal would be to establish, at the minimum, a technical college certificate to be awarded to the student at the point of their high school graduation,” Clanton said. “This, at the very minimum, would make them entry-level ready for employment upon high school graduation.”

That will allow the students to enter the working world in a career where they can support themselves, making them self-sufficient. It also gives them the beginning of a college education they can take with them if they decide to further their education either right after graduating from high school or later.

Carroll County Schools will start with two programs in the health sciences: nursing essentials and emergency services, skills that are in high demand now and projected to continue being careers in high demand. But this is just the beginning, said Assistant Superintendent Christie Johnson. Over the years the existing career centers partnered with WGTC have created more and more programs to offer their students. CEC received a grant through the Technical College System of Georgia this year to expand again and Carroll County plans to expand once the charter school is up and running.

“I can’t tell you how excited I am for our students and the opportunities this is going to give students of Carroll County,” Clanton said.