| For Release: IMMEDIATE | Contact: Public Affairs |
| Date: May 10, 2000 |
PHOTO OPPORTUNITY: Five welders creating paperweights using welding torches, nuts, bolts and nails. 10:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.
LOCATION: Halifax Mall between the Legislative Office Building and the Education Building. Rain location - under the Legislative Building bridge.
Award-Winning Welders to Demonstrate Skills for Legislators
Community college students will create paperweights for the lawmakers on site.
RALEIGH – Five welding students from Bladen Community College are coming to Raleigh, torches in hand, to demonstrate their award-winning skills for legislators. The students want to show that the world-class training they have received at their community college can be used to create something functional as well as visually interesting. They and their instructors, Ed Dent and Al Hester, also want to impress upon the lawmakers that skill courses like welding provide an important part of workforce development for the state.
The students will visit the General Assembly at 10 AM on Wednesday, May 10. "This awareness day is designed to let legislators know what is happening on our campuses and that our students are ready to enter the workforce arena. Our students are prepared to meet the challenges that they will encounter," says Dent, who is also the head of the Industrial Technology Department at Bladen CC. These welding students are the first of several groups of community college students that will visit the General Assembly. The goal is to impress upon the lawmakers the importance of the workforce training and educational services provided at community colleges.
The students will set up a makeshift welding shop at the General Assembly. The paperweights they create will then be given to the lawmakers to help them tame the piles of paper that they have to manage during this budget session. The students created the design of the paperweight themselves. It is a unique combination of nuts, bolts and nails formed into a stylized Pinocchio head. Each paperweight has a tag which reads, "Community Colleges: The Nuts and Bolts of NC Workforce Development."
The demonstration will take place from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Halifax Mall, between the Legislative Office Building and the Education Building. The students participating are Brooks Atkins, Robbie Aycock, Roy Elkins, C.J. Sasser and Tim Williams, who also designed the paperweight.
The students will use a portable welding machine won by Tim Williams in a statewide welding contest sponsored by North Carolina Skills - Vocational Industrial Clubs of America (VICA), held in Hickory earlier this year. Williams won first place in the college welding competition and will compete on a national level in Kansas City, Missouri, this June. Other students from Bladen also competed and won awards. This is the second year Bladen students garnered top honors.
Well-trained welders have a variety of opportunities and are in great demand. A regular welder can find a job starting at $10 per hour and can make up to $18 per hour. Specialized welders can make as much as $24 an hour. Welders provide a variety of services, some functional and some exciting. They repair gas lines, fabricate electrical machinery and farm equipment and they also make the frames for expensive racecars.
The North Carolina Community College System, with more than 259,000 students, is the third largest community college system in the United States. The System is the state's primary agency for delivery of job training, literacy and adult education programs.
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