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Germanna opens Center for Workforce and Community Education at its Fredericksburg campus Date published: 10/30/2004 By CATHY JETT Germanna Community College's work-force classes will no longer have to compete for space at its Fredericksburg campus. The college held a "wire cutting" ceremony yesterday for a new $7.7 million Workforce Development and Technology Center, which will offer more than 100 credit classes beginning next semester. "We will be expanding all our programs," said Kathleen Habel, Germanna's dean of work-force development. "We were limited to what we could do due to lack of space." About 4,000 students enrolled this school year, which is about 1,000 more than in 2003-04. Habel said she expects about 5,000 students to enroll in technology and work-force-development classes next school year. The sleek two-story, 40,000-square-foot brick Workforce Development and Technology Center is the second facility to be built at the college's campus in Spotsylvania County. It features state-of-the-art equipment such as video conferencing, which can be used in both credit and noncredit courses for students and for customized courses developed for area businesses. These will include such things as the Command Spanish class currently offered to teachers and administrators who want to improve their ability to communicate with Spanish-speaking students and their parents. "The center will certainly be a major cornerstone in our ability to market the region to businesses," said Gene Bailey, president of the Fredericksburg Regional Alliance and the keynote speaker at yesterday's event. He said companies that offer high-paying jobs typically focus on locations where there is a well-educated work force. The new center includes a 24-seat executive conference center, a 90-seat auditorium with six high-tech computer labs, a wireless computer lab, an 80-seat training room and interactive video labs that can be used for meetings and training between Germanna's campuses, other education institutions and businesses. "If a business wanted to hold a conference with its main office in California, we could do that," Habel said. Disciplines transferred from the campus's V. Earl Dickinson building to the center will include business, computer technology, math and psychology. It also will offer visual and decorative design, the business of music and project management courses. Having the new facility will allow the college to begin offering such things as classes in Cisco Certified Networking, Network+, Server+, Network Security and Certified Internet Webmaster, as well as testing for professional certifications, Habel said.
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