Dallas College: Help Wanted: Using Grants, Dallas College Steers Local Workforce To Free Career Training Opportunities

Coppell TX

23 April, 2022

6:27 PM

Description

Press release from Dallas College: April 21, 2022 (DALLAS) — Dallas College has stepped up its campaign to engage the community and reach more current and potential students impacted by COVID-19. The college wants to ensure that funding allocated to training the next generation of workers makes it into the hands of those who need it most. This includes creating a one-stop shop to evaluate each student for which grants they qualify for through one common application. While federal, state, county and private grant money has been a welcome boost for those whose job prospects were affected by COVID-19, getting that money paired with the right candidates has been a challenge, said Gloria Smith, Dallas College associate vice chancellor of career connected learning. "Dallas College is in the unique position to be able to help people quickly train for in-demand jobs, and through these funds, the training is essentially free. The trick is getting that message across to our community." Dallas College was awarded a Texas Reskilling and Upskilling through Education (TRUE) grant of $2.5 million. The goal of the money is to quickly (in less than six months) train those who lost jobs due to the pandemic for high-demand jobs through postsecondary workforce credentials and industry certifications. For example, TRUE grants can be used to train personnel for the more than 600 openings with the Dallas Police Department or more than 2,300 available IT jobs in the Dallas-Fort Worth region. The Governor's Emergency Education Relief (GEER) fund helps students who were financially impacted by the pandemic to continue their studies. Dallas College has had over 3,000 students apply for these funds. A team evaluates applications to see which students qualify and of those, which have the strongest need. Those who apply for GEER funds will automatically be evaluated for other funding programs. Additional GEER funds will be available for the Fall semester, and students will be able to apply again this summer. Through CARES grants, Dallas College was able to assist about 3,200 credit students and more than 1,200 continuing education students to reskill for new careers. In addition, from 2020 to date, over 116,000 Dallas College students received more than $82.9 million in CARES/Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds (HEERF) that covered child care, food, housing, learning materials, transportation and tuition to help them remain in school and complete their educational goals. This press release was produced by Dallas College. The views expressed here are the author's own.