Friday, Jan. 06 2012 10:46AM
UCM, R-7, Exergonix collaborate to bring new educational model to Lee’s Summit
Missouri Innovation Campus would train ‘workforce of the future’
By Miranda Wycoff, mwycoff@lsjournal.com
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ReprintAbout a year ago it was announced that Exergonix, a new green-energy technology company, wanted to make Lee’s Summit its permanent home and headquarters.
Today city, education and private sector officials are discussing how that announcement could be the catalyst for reshaping education and workforce training as we know it.
Charles Ambrose, president of the University of Central Missouri, met with the Lee’s Summit R-7 School Board Wednesday at the Summit Center campus to discuss the university’s involvement with the Exergonix project – which has now evolved into a green technology park called the Missouri Innovation Campus.
From the beginning, Exergonix founder and president Don Nissanka – a Lee’s Summit resident and two-degree holder from UCM – has discussed making the Exergonix campus an educational laboratory for on-site workforce training. “One of the major facts of the economy today is that we have high-tech jobs available, but we don’t have the employees to fill those jobs,” Ambrose told the school board.
But by partnering with the university, the school district, Metropolitan Community College-Longview and other area educational entities, Ambrose said the Missouri Innovation Campus can train the workforce of the future.
With the plan he and other key stakeholders have developed, the Missouri Innovation Campus could lower the cost of a college degree, accelerate the time it takes to attain that degree, provide applied learning experiences that make a student workforce ready and build a student financial aid model that would leave students with no debt upon leaving college and give them direct access to a job.
“It would create an identity that provides Lee’s Summit as an educational destination that is currently nowhere else in the nation,” Ambrose said.
And students wouldn’t be just training with Exergonix. Already, business partners including Cerner, Honeywell and ProEnergy of Sedalia have latched onto the idea and students could have the opportunity to gain applied work experience in a number of fields.
For the Missouri Innovation Campus to succeed, Ambrose said the R-7 School District would be a key component – a “pathway for early identification” of students who would be interested in participating in that type of program. “We think we have the perfect prototype with the Summit Technology Center to be a springboard for this,” Ambrose said.
Essentially, the idea is that upon entering high school, a student could enter this program and complete a college degree with applied workforce training within six years.
The program would fundamentally change how a traditional high school and college education is viewed and experienced. And that is something Dr. David McGehee, superintendent of R-7 Schools, said the entire community would need to get on board with. “(Lee’s Summit) is a conservative group that likes to present ourselves as progressive. This program is going to depend on how progressive we want to be and to decide how best to meet the needs of the students first.” “It’s going to have to be accelerated and we’re going to have to get a commitment from our students,” Ambrose added.
Along with educating the community and students about the program, McGehee and other board members suggested that finding legislative support for the project could also be a challenge – particularly getting the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s curriculum requirements on board.
“We’re changing the way we have talked about education for the past 200 years,” board member Annette Braam said.
Ambrose said the Governor’s office has been involved and he expects Gov. Jay Nixon could even make the project a state priority in his annual State of the State address. Additionally, Ambrose has a meeting with Sen. Will Kraus and other Lee’s Summit-area state-elected officials to discuss the project early next week.
Ambrose said he would like to start implementing this program in the fall of 2012.
“The last time UCM revised it’s curriculum it took us six years. The world is not going to give us six years,” he said.
He said he envisions phase one as limiting the program to one stream of discipline and expanding from there.
For now both of the university and the school district are tied to the Summit Technology Center via lease – R-7 until April 18, 2018 and UCM until July 1, 2015. But once their respective leases are up, the university expects to build about 150,000 square feet of educational space on the Exergonix property near U.S. 50 off of M-291 south.
Exergonix itself must be up and running and have at least 150 jobs created by Sept. 1, 2016 in order to fulfill its agreement with the city of Lee’s Summit.
