When Central Nine Career Center first welcomed students on August 29, 1972, it did not include some of today’s most popular offerings, such as its dental and health sciences, information technology and justice programs penalty
The school, then known as Central Nine Vocational Technical School, offered 15 programs compared to 27 today. These classes included: accounting, secretarial-administrative laboratory, data processing, distributive education, ornamental horticulture, diversified health aide, auto body repair, auto mechanics. , construction trades, restoration, electronics, mechanical drawing, printing, mechanical workshop and welding.
Central Nine still included nine student-sending high schools, but since opening 50 years ago, Edinburgh Community High School has joined the C4 Columbus Area Career Connection and was replaced by Perry Meridian High School.
In the midst of celebrating its 50th anniversary, school officials are preparing to begin a $4 million renovation project to double the space for its welding program, which is the most popular program in Central Nine, said Bill Kovach, the school’s principal. .
“One of the biggest things we’ve noticed is that more and more families and students are realizing the benefits of career and technical education,” Kovach said. “They’ve seen that they can get higher levels of achievement while in high school by attending the career center.”
As demand has increased, long-serving employees have seen the career center evolve, especially those who have spent more than half of their existence at Central Nine. Enrollment is approaching 1,300 students, compared to about 900 students three decades ago, said Laura Showalter, the school’s benefits coordinator, who has been with Central Nine for 29 years.
“We’ve just grown a lot. We used to have the principal, the assistant principal, myself and a counselor running the office,” Showalter said. “I was also here when the academy came in, around the 2002-03 school year, we started the academy when the kids from all the home schools came here for a whole day and got their academics here. We were like a high school, we had to provide lunch, nursing for the kids, counseling and a lot of things that their schools do now. It was too demanding and the funding, it just ended up being taken away, but it was a great program.”
Darryl Willoughby, who has just started his 32nd year at the school as a precision machining technology teacher, has been around for two-thirds of the school’s history. In his class, students use machines to create dice and shave aluminum.
“The thing that has changed the most is the technology,” Willoughby said. “We usually take assistance with cards, not with a computer. We used to do everything with pen and pencil, then computers came along and we’ve grown from there. It’s a big change, being an old man. I think we have record enrollment now and it’s a big part of graduation pathways, it plays a big role in high school graduation and sending kids to high school (education) in career areas and places of work”.
The building itself and what’s inside has also changed during his time at the school.
“Over the years, we’ve had three other building projects where we’ve added or changed the configuration of the building. We’ve grown quite a bit in the last 32 years. We’ve had several construction projects, auctioning off old equipment to pay for state-of-the-art equipment. We started with World War II machines and now have a lineup from the last one. We’ve gone from yesterday’s equipment to today’s machinery.”
The Central Nine Career Center will celebrate its 50th anniversary on Oct. 1, with a daytime festival that includes food, bounce houses, miniature golf, an inflatable obstacle course and music by the Jam Box brass band, as well as a set of Central Nine instructors. The festival will take place from 10:00 am to 7:00 pm, with food trucks from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. The staff band will perform at 4 p.m., followed by the Jam Box at 5 p.m., Central Nine spokeswoman Tiffany Bickerstaff said.
School leaders hope to have a more formal ceremony later in the school year, he said.
Along with the ceremony, Kovach is working on collecting stories from people who attended the vocational and technical education school.
“If we’ve had about 1,000 high school students a year for 50 years, that’s 50,000 people we’ve helped educate for the future,” Kovach said. “I would like to do something to celebrate the history of C9 in a more formal ceremony for the people who have been involved with C9 for the last 50 years.”
