Osceola County released more details about the $2.1 million Manufacturing Career and Technical Education Academy that was approved on June 27 and built at Liberty High School.
Commissioner Brandon Arrington, whose district 3 includes Liberty High, arranged for $500,000 in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) “Targeted Recovery” federal funds for the project.
According to the county and Osceola County School District, 180 students will be able to enroll in the academy through the summer of 2024.
“This provides the training and education opportunities that mesh with market demand and create sustainable future employment for individuals,” said Arrington. “The Academy at Liberty will develop a local, skilled workforce to support long term, economic resiliency and reduce workplace disruption.”
The county noted Liberty’s place as an underrepresented campus since opening in 2007 as one of the reasons the academy would make an impact in postsecondary education opportunities among its alums.
Since 2014, the county has made a nine-figure investment in the NeoCity technology district east of Kissimmee, in the hopes it will become a national leader in semiconductor production and advance existing investments in semiconductor research, development, and manufacturing. The goal is to establish Central Florida as a regional semiconductor hub and effectively reshaping a sizable portion of the area’s economy.
“The Academy fits a goal of preparing the workforce for careers (at NeoCity),” a county release said last week.
Not long after the pandemic created its seismic employment shakeup in March of 2020, Osceola’s unemployment rate was the third highest in the nation, pushing 30 percent.
The response was millions of dollars in education and career training spending, using federal recovery dollars. Early this year, $12.4 million was spent on Osceola Prosper, a program that allows every member of Osceola County’s Class of 2022 to attended Valencia College or Osceola Technical College tuition-free.
The county also partnered with the School District on the opening of a low-cost veterinary clinic at Harmony High, which will train a new generation of animal science students, and a $750,000 CareerSource Central Florida grant to help residents raise skills at no cost in order to seek jobs in the county’s rapidly expanding healthcare, manufacturing and construction industries.
Information from Osceola County was used in this report.
