Growing interest in trades drives CVES expansion

Champlain Valley Educational Services’ $59M investment in trades education aims to meet labor demand

By Tim Rowland

As the current generation of North County high school students shows more interest in trades and, with them, the promise of immediate and lucrative employment, the Champlain Valley Educational Services, which serves 16 North Country school districts in Clinton and Essex counties, is responding. A new, 155,000-square-foot training center in Plattsburgh is planned to meet the growing demand and prepare young people for jobs of the future.

From pre-pandemic enrollment of less than 600 students, more than 800 are now attending CV-TEC, the trades arm of CVES, and programs are routinely filled, making new space more critical.

CVES received final state and local approval for the $59 million project in December, and it’s expected to be completed in July 2026. The school will be built by the private Community Initiative Development Corp. and leased to CVES for 20 years, at which point voters will have the option to buy the building at a cost projected to be less than $500,000. 

Its course offerings will reflect traditional programming in fields such as nursing and auto mechanics, but also training for new careers in energy, environmental conservation, aerospace composites used in electric aircraft and electric vehicle repair. It will also include a $3 million food hub that will put more wholesome, regionally grown made-from-scratch foods on the tables of school cafeterias.

“If a farmer has a surplus, we will have a big blast chiller, so we’ll  be able to buy 400 pounds of something and flash freeze it so that the nutrients remain,” said Julie Holbrook, food service director for CVES. “There are so many things that we’ll be able to do to keep the nutrient level higher, use more local food and hopefully be able to help more of the communities and smaller farms.”

At the same time, the hub will be teaching culinary and hospitality skills, which are in high demand in the Adirondack tourism industry.

Bell said interest in the trades, which had languished earlier this century, has grown rapidly in the past few years as enrollment has spiked from 600 to 800 students, with some having to be turned away for lack of space.

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Attention was focused on the trades during COVID-19, when contractors reported difficulty finding help to meet escalating demand in the construction industry, following a wave of retirements with too few young people trained to take their place.

Bell said that under Michele Friedman, executive director of career and technical education at CVES, the old stereotypes — that trades were an afterthought for kids who weren’t college material — messaging has changed to reflect opportunities in so-called nontraditional career paths that include high school instruction, certification and associate degrees for young people more inclined to work with their hands.

“You look at juniors and seniors in high school and you see students who are passionate about coming to school every single day because they are working in fields that are of interest to them,” Bell said. “And that’s starting to catch on, as they realize they can come to CV-Tech, be themselves and find themselves, while also getting the skills necessary to be quality contributors as adults.”

They also see financial advantages, as trades can pay just as well or better than jobs that require a four-year degree, they can enter the workforce and begin to earn a paycheck at a younger age and have none of the crippling student-loan debt that their parents might still be paying off.

The need for the center became apparent, Bell said, not just because of student demand, but employer demand as well. For example, CV-TEC currently lacks space for a heating, air conditioning and ventilation program, even though workers in that field are in high demand.

Bell said the school works closely with industry to meet emerging needs, and has the ability to adapt on the fly — when BETA Technologies, which is developing electric aircraft in Burlington, needed employees to paint aerospace composites, CV-Tech carved a new program out of its auto-body shop.

Training more students in the trades also beefs up the skilled, North Country workforce, which is needed to attract new industry.

“For our current business and industries, they have massive needs right now in the workforce, so it will help ramp up that training to meet their needs,” Bell said. “But potentially more importantly, it’s the future workforce; it helps drive our economic development of the North Country to say we have a state-of-the-art training facility for the next generation workforce right here in the North Country — bring your businesses opportunities to our communities, because that ultimately raises our area as a whole. “

The center will be built adjacent to two other CVES classroom buildings on Military Turnpike. The lease deal — patterned after successful projects in the Capital District — means it will be more affordable to Essex and Clinton county school districts, which pay to send students to CV-TEC based on rolling enrollment averages. Districts can be reimbursed up to 80% by the state depending on the wealth, or lack of it, in the district. 

The project is also funded in part by grants from the New York Department of Agriculture and the Empire State Development Fund. 

CVES also operates a trade school in Mineville in Essex County, which is experiencing some of the same growing pains as Plattsburgh, and may be considered for future expansion, Bell said.