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Ore. Community College EV Program Set to Debut Next Fall

After a delay, Linn-Benton Community College will roll out its new electric vehicle program in 2025. The program is designed to recruit women to the field, but had difficulty attracting qualified instructors. It is aimed at filling a training gap for EV technicians.

An electric vehicle charges
An electric vehicle charges its battery at a public station in Kearny Mesa.
Rob Nikolewski/TNS
(TNS) — Linn-Benton Community College is developing a new electric vehicle program to debut next fall, one that's geared toward recruiting more women into the field.

The grant-funded program was slated to begin this term but ran into a few roadblocks. A key one: finding qualified instructors who can helm the course.

That's according to LBCC's Automotive Technology Department Chair Mike LeBlanc, who in 2023 successfully applied for the National Science Foundation grant that's funding the program and others like it across the country.

LeBlanc's program has since been approved by Oregon's Higher Education Coordinating Commission, while the LBCC Board of Directors officially OK'd its budget earlier this summer.

TOO NEW?


The last remaining hurdle, however, has been finding an instructor with electric vehicle know-how.

Pushing back the course's start date by a year, LeBlanc says he's now undergone his own professional development training, along with fellow automotive faculty member Matt Dubanoski , and plans to lead the course next fall.

That is, if they can't find a candidate with the right experience by this spring.

The challenge isn't unique to LBCC. College spokesperson Matt Scotton said LeBlanc had spoken to other NSF-funded electric vehicle program heads over the past year, who've been in the same electric boat.

"Community colleges nationwide are having trouble finding qualified CTE (career and technical education) instructors for programs like this," Scotton said via email.

For LeBlanc, one sticking point for prospective candidates is making the leap from the private sector into the world of education.

"A big hurdle is how do we entice experts in that field to come and take a huge pay cut and teach," he said.

BRIDGING THE GAP


For context, LBCC is one of more than a dozen colleges and trade schools since 2022 to receive funding for electric vehicle programs from the National Science Foundation. That's by way of the Advanced Technological Education grant.

The particular fund supports education programs for technicians in high-technology fields, like electric vehicle maintenance, as well as recruitment efforts for underrepresented groups in these fields.

LeBlanc clinched $350,000 for LBCC's proposed electric vehicle technician program, which also hopes to recruit more women into the college's automotive courses.

According to one 2023 survey, woman make up only 24% of the transportation industry workforce.

Part of the work is conducting outreach, LeBlanc said, because many women don't see a career path in the industry. According to the grant proposal, there will also be planned training sessions to create a more supportive culture for women in the automotive program.

LeBlanc is currently working on developing the curriculum for six new advanced courses, four of which focus primarily on electric and hybrid vehicles, he said.

The program, LeBlanc said, works to shrink the skills gap facing technicians in the automotive field in southwest Oregon, with a nod to the growing interest in EVs.

Indeed, the sale of battery-powered electric vehicles has risen in the U.S., with more than 1 million EVs sold this year, though challenges remain for consumers. That includes the availability of charging stations.

Currently, the college's Automotive Transportation Technology Center in Lebanon , which houses LBCC's automotive program, has one fully operational electric vehicle — a red Nissan Leaf — parked outside the facility's shop.

It's plugged into the shop's one and only electric vehicle charging station. There's also a limited inventory of hybrids in the lot.

According to LeBlanc, the goal is to have more EVs and related-equipment for students to use and tinker with — via donations and sponsorships with manufacturers — when courses launch next fall. Around $58,000 of grant funds, LeBlanc said, has been used purchase a diagnostic tool for high voltage battery testing.

But, according to automotive instructor Dubanoski, because the EV field is an emerging one, another resource that's still hard to come by is qualified instructors.

There's a gap in training among general automotive technicians, and the training for technicians of electric vehicle dealerships, he said.

"We're bridging that gap now," Dubanoski said of the planned program.

HIRING CHALLENGES


This past summer, LeBlanc said he worked to fill two positions at LBCC's automotive department, one left vacant by a retiring faculty member, and one for the planned electric vehicle program.

Out of nine candidates, five dropped out, he said.

They filled the faculty position, LeBlanc said, but still didn't find a candidate for the new course. If no one is found to lead the college's electric vehicle program this coming spring, LeBlanc said he'll take the reins and find someone to fill his current role.

The challenge of finding instructors for career technical education programs isn't isolated to community college automotive programs. It's also been an ongoing one.

According to the Association for Career and Technical Education, a national advocacy group, roughly a third of public schools reported difficulties filling open CTE positions during the 2020-21 school year.

For Ken Dickson-Self, an instructor at LBCC's mechatronics department — a field that combines mechanics and electronics — a key challenge for career technical education broadly is that the trades generally pay pretty well, compared to teaching positions.

"Talking somebody out of doing what they love, so they can teach it to other people, isn't always an easy sell," he said by phone.

Still, LeBlanc is optimistic about LBCC's planned electric vehicle technician program. He plans for either himself or someone else to helm the program next year.

He's also grateful grant funds are supporting a new program at the college, considering LBCC has suffered budget cuts in recent years.

The plan, he said, is to acquire more grant funding to keep the program sustainable into the future.

©2024 Corvallis Gazette-Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.