Education

Cobb County Schools Approves College And Career Academy

June 10th, 2016

Cobb County schools will build a new $29.9 million College and Career Academy in Marietta.

The academy will primarily target students who want to graduate from high school to a job, but Cobb County School Board Vice Chair David Chastain said it won’t be your average vocational technical school of decades past.

“It’s not just learning to use a skillsaw and making a cutting board that looks like a rooster or something,” Chastain said. “This is working with technology, maybe even learning coding.”

The school district will work with the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce and nearby universities like Kennesaw State to develop the academic curriculum this summer.

The College and Career Academy will be built on the campus of Osborne High School and is scheduled to open in the fall of 2018.

The magnet program will be open to all Cobb County students through an application process.

Grant Rivera, chief of staff with Cobb County Schools, said the academy will serve more than one purpose.

“Oftentimes vocational technical programs are in the career tech industries so you may have construction, auto mechanics, horticulture,” Rivera said. “While certainly there may be some elements of career tech in this, the primary focus is around STEM education, so we want to make sure we’re preparing kids both for post-secondary opportunities in the STEM fields as well as potentially vocational fields.”

Cobb County voters approved funding for the school through an optional 1 percent sales in 2013.