As central New York continues to prepare a workforce for Micron, a program at Le Moyne College is expanding, to encourage a particular demographic to consider these high-demand jobs.
For the past seven years, Le Moyne’s ERIE21 program has offered Syracuse City School District youth programs involving coding, robotics, engineering, and quantitative reasoning. They are woven into academic support and college readiness to get these students prepared for some of the 50,000 jobs that Micron projects will be part of it’s $100 billion investment in central New York.
Now that program is pushing those opportunities into two rural districts, Onondaga Central and Lafayette. Lafayette Superintendent Jeremy Belfield said this exposes kids in his district to experiences they can’t get at a small rural school.
"We have three 3D printers that will take 18 hours to print a very small sample," Belfield said. "They [LeMoyne] have industrial-size, commercial-size 3D printers, the level of tech that they're going to see in private industry that a small school district like Lafayette can't necessarily afford."
Belfield said it also will offer opportunities to students from the Onondaga Nation, who make up 40% of the district’s population. Onondaga County is chipping in $250,000 for the program. County Executive Ryan McMahon said this is a component of a complex workforce development strategy, with a goal of training workers for four computer chip fabricating plants down the line.
"Our job is to grow, but develop at the same time with all these jobs," McMahon said. "We're just talking about Micron right now, we're not even talking about the supply chain that's coming and the other massive investments by companies that are here today."
