Kirkwood selects land northwest of Washington for regional center

WASHINGTON, Iowa -- An 8-acre parcel of land along Lexington Boulevard northwest of Washington has been selected as the location of Kirkwood Community College's  Washington County Regional Center.

The $9 million facility will be constructed on land donated by Jim and Margaret Dunn of Washington, longtime Kirkwood supporters. Jim Dunn has held a seat on the Kirkwood Foundation board of directors for a decade and the family supports a special Kirkwood scholarship for students who attended a Washington County high school.

The 35,000-square-foot Washington County Regional Center will house programming provided through a partnership with several local high schools. The cooperative arrangement enables rural students to participate in hands-on technical programs and college-level arts and sciences courses that individual districts probably could not provide alone.

Some of the programs students can find at the new Kirkwood Washington County Regional Center include architecture/construction, automotive technology, computer networking, criminal justice, patient care/CNA, and arts and sciences.

Tera Pickens, Kirkwood Washington County Center director, said the college's Washington-area industry partners provided input for the classes that will be offered at the new regional center.

"With their help, we crafted training programs to directly feed the employment needs of our area," Pickens said.

Kirkwood plans to break ground for the Washington County Regional Center in early fall this year. Optimistically, the facility is expected will open in the fall of 2013.

"We are very excited to announce this huge step toward our new regional center's completion," said Kirkwood President Mick Starcevich. "This amazing and generous donation, along with the bond issue dollars local taxpayers granted us this past fall, will bring much-needed advanced technology training to Washington County."

Voters in Kirkwood's seven-county service area overwhelmingly passed a bond issue in September to build regional education centers in Linn, Johnson and Washington counties. The facilities will integrate state-of-the-art technology with cutting edge instruction.

Pickens said the new Kirkwood Washington County Regional Center will bring another beneficial economic bonus to the area.

"High school students get hands-on career experience and at the same time earn valuable college credit at no cost to their families," she said. "This means an overall savings of hundreds of thousands of college tuition dollars annually."

The regional education centers in Linn, Johnson and Washington counties will be modeled after Kirkwood's Jones Regional Education Center in Monticello, which opened in 2008. Jones Regional was created as a partnership of eight local school districts, the college and local businesses.

The Linn Regional Education Center will be located in a 98,138-square-foot building on 11.47 acres of land at 1 Martha's Way in Hiawatha. The Johnson Regional Education Center will be located in the University of Iowa Oakdale Research Park in Coralville.