ACTC Ready for School Year, Looking to Future

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

As a new school year begins, the Anderson Career and Technology Center is entering it with a stronger front porch, a bigger footprint and a long list of ambitions that would make a conventional high school blush. The center, which serves students from Anderson School Districts 1 and 2, has added parking, is preparing for a new welding and auto collision facility, and is trying to keep pace with a student population that has filled the school to capacity.

Hollie Harrell, the center’s director, said the school recently completed a new parking lot in front of the building, adding about 50 spaces for the conference center and roughly 120 total spaces when student parking and a bus loop are included. The conference center, opened in 2018, was designed to give business partners and the two districts a place to meet and collaborate, but the campus has since to 2.000 students.

The center now serves just over 2,000 students and turns away about 200 more each year, Harrell said. Because the district cannot take on debt for such projects, the expansion has to be planned and paid for in advance, making the parking project a necessary first step before any major building work could begin.

The next phase is a new welding and auto collision facility, which Harrell said will replace older shops that have ventilation problems and other outdated conditions. The current welding building, she said, opened in the late 1990s and needs updates to address OSHA and air-quality concerns.

The new construction will also separate heavy truck traffic from student parking, a practical fix for a campus that has seen semis delivering materials through the same space where teenagers park and buses move through. Once the new building is complete, the old welding and auto collision spaces are expected to be repurposed for advanced manufacturing.

At the center, no single program has surged far beyond the others because nearly all of them are already full, Harrell said. The most popular offerings include sports medicine and athletic training, cybersecurity, computer programming and game design, while agriculture has grown with the addition of a second teacher and a stronger emphasis on horticulture.

That agricultural expansion reflects a broader reality in Anderson County, where farming remains an important industry even as manufacturing and technology dominate the public imagination. Harrell said the field now includes agritourism, farm-to-table work, hydroponics and other career paths that do not look much like the old image of agriculture.

For newcomers, the center’s range can be surprising. It offers the expected vocational tracks—culinary arts, welding, auto technology, auto collision and construction—but also programs in engineering, aerospace, health science, media broadcasting, marketing, digital art and design, biomedical studies, cosmetology, law enforcement, firefighting, computer programming, esports, cybersecurity and mechatronics.

Harrell said those programs are designed not just to train students for jobs, but to make them “whole” graduates, ready for college, work and civic life. That is why the center has after-school activities tied to its academic tracks, including esports, FFA competitions, graphic communications, auto collision, law enforcement and a culinary arts team with a record of success in state and national competitions.

Much of the center’s strength comes from local employers willing to take students as interns and co-op workers. Harrell said more than 100 businesses worked with the school this year, and the district covers workers’ compensation insurance so companies can take on students with less risk.

Those partnerships are especially important in health care, where students have worked with AnMed through a MedEx-style program that exposes them to careers beyond nursing, and in the trades, where companies such as Hill Electric provide scholarships, tool bags and presentations. Harrell said the arrangement is a win for both students and employers, since many of the students become long-term workers once they find a field they want to stay in.

Harrell said one major challenge is persuading students and parents that advanced manufacturing is still a strong career path, even though it looks very different from the textile-era jobs many families once knew. Today’s manufacturing, she said, is clean, climate-controlled and highly technical, and students in mechatronics and related fields can often be hired before they leave high school.

She also sees future growth for teacher cadet programs, early childhood education, a possible child-care center for district employees, and a leadership track for students drawn to government or nonprofit work. For now, though, the immediate milestone is more basic: a school year in which the parking lot works, the construction moves ahead and the center keeps expanding without losing sight of why it exists.