LIMA — Its $53 million renovation and expansion project now complete, the Apollo Career Center will open its doors to the public on Thursday with events meant to highlight the campus upgrades and reflect on 40 years of serving Limaland with high school and adult vocational education.
Among the changes that debuted this fall as part of the last phase of the nearly three-year construction project were a third commercial kitchen for the school’s high school and adult culinary arts program, a student commons, a café, a new garden and a state-of-the-art security system.
“We wanted it to be a showplace for the community,” said superintendent Judy Wells. Beyond the eye-pleasing aesthetics, Wells said the renovations will better position Apollo’s graduates for today’s jobs.
“Take any employment sector of 40 years ago, and it’s either disappeared or completely reinvented itself,” Wells said. “For us to be able to produce the type of employee that’s needed for all of our industry sectors, we had to reinvent ourselves, too.”
New technology
Administrators said every aspect of Apollo’s existing, 117,583-square foot campus was overhauled, with the high school and adult education building size nearly doubled to 224,015 square feet. And that’s just the brick-and-mortar aspect of the school. There were technological enhancements, as well, from computer-assisted tools to virtual reality learning platforms such as zSpace, which some staff are using to enhance health and science classwork.
Paul Crow, a 1979 graduate of Apollo’s carpentry program, is the president and CEO of Tuttle Services, Inc. He said there have been “unreal” technological advancements in his trade that he could not have imagined when he was a student.
“The old days of using string and tape measurer to lay things out,” he said, are gone.
Crow said he’s proud to have been a part of improving his alma mater.
“I truly wanted to give back to the school,” he said. Crow said he did that by keeping the project on schedule and on budget.
Lima’s future employees
Jeff Sprague, president and CEO of Allen Economic Development Group, said the timing of Apollo’s upgrades “couldn’t be any better.”
He said the region is facing a skill shortage.
“By 2024, there’s going to be 21,000 additional jobs available at our companies,” he said, but not enough people with the skills and education necessary to tackle those jobs.
Sprague said Apollo Career Center will play a big role in halting this opportunity exodus.
“The first thing is, retain our youth, engage them in the economic development process by allowing them to see the great career opportunities in our community and the pathway to get there,” he said.
Sprague pointed to Diamond Manufacturing in Bluffton as one of those pathways. The company makes material handling racks for the automotive industry and has grown from five employees in 2010 to nearly 100.
“During that time we got affiliated with Apollo,” said general manager Gene Heitmeyer. “We’ve really turned to them to help us grow with the educated and talented welders that they’ve produced. We probably have six or seven of them right now.”
According to its 2014-2015 report card, 89.6 percent of Apollo’s graduates had jobs or were enrolled in postsecondary education or additional training in the six months after they left school, earning an “A” from the Ohio Department of Education, while 23.4 percent received industry credentials or certification.
Promising time
Apollo’s expansion comes at a promising time for vocational education, which is getting renewed attention after years of being seen as second rate to a college degree. President Barack Obama has called for more career training at the high school and college levels. Ohio state lawmakers approved legislation in 2014 expanding career and technical education into the seventh and eighth grades.
“There will always be people, and I have been one of them, that say too many people go to college,” said Jon Rockhold, who was an early superintendent of Apollo and is now the dean of its board of trustees. “People can become very productive by learning a skill or a trade, and that’s what Apollo’s all about.”
Rockhold hopes the public takes advantage of the open house to better understand that.
“We will never, ever be able to explain all the good things of Apollo,” said Rockhold. “This is just a continuation of the process of telling the people what a resource they have available to them.”
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