Donna ISD, Raymondville and Pharr-San Juan-Alamo (PSJA) received over $760,000 in grants by the Texas Workforce Commission.
Assisting with Career and Technical Education Programs
For Donna, the award is its first. These grants are part of the Texas Workforce Commission’s (TWC) Jobs and Education for Texans program, known as JET, which the state gives about $10 million every two years. The grants are there to help schools and education centers lower the cost of developing Career and Technical Education programs in high-demand areas.
This is an obvious welcome site to see with local school districts achieving the status that is making them able to get the money to expand and upgrade and move programs for their school forward such as welding in the case of Donna or the Health Science pathway at PSJA.
Business Opportunities for the Future
The opportunities that this type of money brings not only will help our students become better prepared for the future with education and help them compete in the business world but will help attract more businesses and keep our future leaders down here and help to give back as the state is starting to do with their schools.
In the past 20 years, we are seeing more and more of the grants and money beginning to trickle down to the Rio Grande Valley.
Hands-on experiences in the medical field through the Health Science pathway and being able to work with welding equipment or high tech machinery in order to stay with the times for future innovations are allowing more and more children to graduate with technical degrees each year and become certified with the most advanced technology available.
The path to becoming a nurse or pharmacy technician or emergency medical technician is now that much easier thanks to grants like this and the schools are doing more of their part with really bringing the education level up to standards which deserve to be recognized and highlighted in all that has been accomplished so far.
The Rio Grande Valley has long been an impoverished region with education levels and unemployment levels among the lowest and highest. The trend is going the other way now and it’s nice to see these announcements coming more frequently to an area that is finally catching up with the rest of the nation.
