Meet Kristy Black: One of visionaries behind Kirkwood Regional Centers

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Recently, I started looking into a story idea about how the Kirkwood Regional Centers came to be, and what we can learn from it.

The angle explores how different organizations can agree on a greater need and work together to achieve something they couldn't have alone, while overcoming politics, turf wars and financial hurdles.

Here's some background as the information gathering gets underway.

The Kirkwood Regional Centers are facilities that connect Kirkwood Community College, local school districts and local industry. The first center was opened in 2009 in Jones County, and three more are in the works or have opened.

Kristy Black is Kirkwood's dean of the regional centers and county centers, and has been with Kirkwood for more than 20 years.

Kristy Black, dean of Kirkwood Community College regional and county centers

She started as an assistant at the Jones County Center.

Different from regional centers, county centers are much smaller and provide continuing education, high school completion services and workforce training. In counties with regional centers, those services have been relocated to the regional centers.

Black was promoted to Jones County Center director in 1998, and later Cedar County Center came under her supervision. Black was the original director of Kirkwood Regional Center - Jones County.

More than 10 years ago, she and others started creating the vision for the regional centers.

Black had been hearing from contacts in various industries about challenges finding workers in fields, including but not limited to welding, automotive techs and patient care.

Meanwhile, K-12 schools, particularly in rural areas, were (and still are) struggling with resources to provide educational opportunities that an urban district might have.

While working in her county center role, Black helped start career academics.

Career academies had high tech-hands on labs focused on very specific topics, such as welding, automotive or patient care. Teachers came from the professional world, among other places.

Individual districts couldn't support the academies on their own, but pooled together they had enough demand and resources.

Students from the school districts of Midland, Olin, Anamosa and Monticello attended these career first academies, but students were traveling all over the region for different focus areas.

Still the demand was there, and it was filling a need, she said.

"That's when we had this a-ha moment," Black said on Thursday. "What if we had one location in a county with all the academies so that high schools don't have to go all over the place."

As the first regional center was taking shape, they invited more school districts that geographically made sense, including Cascade, Delhi, Springville and Central City.