Plumbers and Steamfitters (UA) Local 184 and West Kentucky Community and Technical College (WKCTC) earned national recognition for partnering to provide a unique "going green" training program for the union's apprentices and journeymen.

The Paducah, Ky., union and school plan to follow up with a two-year college degree program for Local 184 members. Explains Kyle Henderson, business manager:

A lot of our members have some college but not a degree. This unique program will give them a chance to finish their degree. But it’s also for members who have no college credit.

Dr. Barbara Veazey, WKCTC president, is a fan of the union-college teamwork. Says Veazey:

Half of the jobs filled over the next decade will require technical skills beyond the high school level, but not a four-year degree.

Graduates of the Local 184-WKCTC degree program will earn an associate’s degree in applied sciences, Henderson says. “Our apprentices will be able to get the degree while they go through our five-year apprenticeship. But the degree program will be also open to journeymen.”

Henderson says the union and the college are working out the details, “but we hope to have the program started in a year or so.”

Meanwhile, Henderson and Veazey are proud that the joint Local 184-WKCTC green systems awareness training effort drew accolades from Second Lady Jill Biden and from Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. The program is funded by a grant of just over $1 million from the U.S. Department of Labor.

He says Local 184 and WKCTC, both of which had green systems awareness programs going, were competing for the grant "when we decided to apply for it together. So we burned some midnight oil to make the deadline and got it in September 2010."

The collaboration is affording union plumbers and HVAC technicians “the training they need to service, install or repair the newer equipment and use the newer applications,” according to Henderson.

He says the program, which the grant funded for three years, will end up training 246 apprentices and journeymen. 

They graduate with green systems awareness certification that will enhance their Kentucky HVAC and plumbers' licenses.

Biden and Solis saluted the program when they made Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Lexington a stop on their three-day, multistate "Community College to Career" bus tour.

Solis cited the Local 184-WKCTC partnership “as an excellent example of a community working to assure it is providing the education to be workforce ready,” Veazey said.

Henderson and Corey Hicks (see photo), a Local 184 member who went to WKCTC and is in the green awareness training program, participated in a panel discussion at the Lexington college. The tour was designed to showcase the special role community colleges play in workforce development.

“Dr. Biden taught at a community college for 18 years and Secretary Solis was a community college trustee,” Henderson says, adding that the green awareness program "has been monumental for us.”

Dr. Tammy Owen, WKCTC associate vice president of academic affairs, says:

It is a pleasure to partner with Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 184 to provide training in green technologies. WKCTC is proud to be an educational institution that supports those in Local 184 who are working to improve energy efficiency in our community.