I had been hearing about the Volt Center near downtown New Bern, an operation of Craven Community College. I would hear about it at a workforce event. There would be a panel, and Ray Staats, Craven’s president, would have five minutes. Or Gery Boucher, Craven’s vice president for development, would use his five minutes to talk about it.
I finally saw the Volt Center, and it’s something. Staats and his team, including Volt Dean Jeffrey Schulze, have built an impressive workforce campus out of some old buildings about three miles from the main New Bern campus.
Folks are learning trades in demand at Craven’s industrial park, a few exits west off
U.S. 70. They are in demand at Fleet Readiness Center East on Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, the other direction down U.S. 70 in Havelock, around 18 miles southeast of New Bern. Craven has a Havelock campus, which I will get to in this column, because it
is a crucial part of the college’s mission. But first, let me talk about the Volt Center and
the forklifts.
As Volt was getting going about five years ago, appliance manufacturer BSH, a major Craven County employer, told the college its distribution center needed 10 forklift drivers with experience operating a clamp shell attachment. BSH had donated such an attachment several months earlier for general training. Now it had an urgent need. Immediately, the staff tweaked their forklift program to create a specific course, with input from BSH. Two classes started up.
This is not unusual, according to Staats, as he showed me around Volt. At one point, we were in the diesel and heavy equipment building. “Gregory Poole comes to us and says we need diesel mechanics,” referring to the Raleigh-based Caterpillar dealership. “We have a conversation. Tell us exactly what you need. Then we go out and find a curriculum and give it back to them. Is this what you want?” The course gets tweaked based on the feedback, and maybe Poole can free up someone to help, and donate equipment so they’re training on Poole’s stuff that the graduates are going to be working on.
HOW IT STARTED
Staats became Craven president a decade ago. He previously spent 14 years in the Air Force, and a dozen years in higher education, mostly running community colleges, including the Community College of the Air Force.
His military background and workforce focus suited the Craven job. Craven County’s economy is tied to the military. FRC East repairs Navy and Marine aircraft and is the largest industrial employer in eastern North Carolina, with 4,000 workers, including 1,000 engineers. This creates demand for skilled trades.
Volt’s nearly 5 acres is dominated by a brick building facing First Street. In 1947, the building opened as the city electric plant. The city later got out of the generation business, and used the building as a warehouse.
The city asked Staats if the college might be interested in it. They asked the right person. Staats had a vision for a workforce center focused on short-term training courses. But he was limited by space on the main campus. HVAC instruction was in an 8-by-8 shed, enough for three students and four air conditioners. The Volt site also was within walking distance for transportation-challenged, low-income folks looking for skills.
“I have enough background in workforce development to know, if I have floor space, I can do stuff. So we just kind of took one step at a time,” he says.
With the help of a $1.3 million federal grant, plus funds from the Golden LEAF Foundation, city, county, Craven 100 Alliance and Harold H. Bate Foundation, the Volt Center opened in 2019 with programs that included HVAC, electrical, plumbing and construction. It has expanded since then, filling seven buildings on the site. Classes include carpentry, masonry, small engine/appliance repair, welding, heavy truck systems, as well as diesel and forklift training mentioned above. Many students get tuition funded by the Volt Toolbelt Trust, which costs about $50,000 a year. Staats also moved the Small Business Center to the Volt — more convenient for entrepreneurs — and started an incubator.
Volt also has law enforcement training, which will move to a $12 million public safety training center at the industrial park, thanks to the legislature and a lot of work by the college and the county. That will open up more room at the Volt Center, and Staats
has plans.
Some 4,500 students have gone through the center. That’s what Boucher told the North Carolina Defense Summit in April. “That’s pretty amazing when you really think about it,” says Boucher. “These individuals are in short-term training. They’re getting their skills and they’re getting out to the workforce.” People are always asking, “How do we build a workforce?” he says. “Well, community colleges, in my opinion, are truly workforce development centers.”
It isn’t just the Volt Center, Boucher says. This was a defense summit, and so he talked about the unique location and role of the Havelock campus. So did the moderator of a panel at the defense summit, retired Navy Capt. Keith Wheeler, executive director of East Carolina University’s Office of National Security and Industry Initiatives. He made a point of saying, “Craven has one of the most direct pathways to DoD that I’m aware of in the state.”
THE HAVELOCK CAMPUS
And that’s why I drove down to Havelock, to see Megan Johnson, the workforce development coordinator at the 24-acre Havelock campus. It is across the road from the Cherry Point fence. The campus has been there since 2004, when three buildings opened up, including the Institute of Aeronautical Technology, reflecting the campus focus on training workers for FRC East. In 2020, the STEM Building opened up.
She took me around. Most of the folks we bumped into, students or instructors, were active-duty Marines, or recent Marines or were at FRC East. I saw a classroom where Marines were working on math skills. I looked at aviation pathways course materials, where new FRC employees can learn the jargon of jets and tiltrotors. I saw a Lean Six Sigma team, big in manufacturing. We went into the composite lab; military aviation is all about composites. We saw planes and helicopters out back, and toured welding.
We visited the NC State engineering program, housed in the new STEM building. Students start as Craven students for their first two years, and then stay on the Havelock campus as NC State students in mechanical or electrical engineering. They are taught by NC State engineering professors 130 miles away in Raleigh using two-way, big-screen video displays. The NC State program has graduated 100 engineers since 2012, including its assistant director, Nathan Rowland, a Beaufort native who worked after graduation at FRC East before his current job. More than 90% of Havelock’s NC State grads are working locally, mostly at FRC East.
There’s a fence that separates Craven’s Havelock buildings from the base, but the campus is truly part of Cherry Point. ■
