Pueblo Community College Southwest will host an open house Wednesday to share what PCC is doing to help train and educate students for the forestry workforce.
Forestry professionals can learn PCC’s new forestry and wildland fire program and try out the school’s new harvesting simulator.
Tim Reader and other workers from the Colorado State Forest Service in Durango plan to attend. PCC has invited other forest and watershed health organizations to attend the open house, which is open.
The open house is 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
“The purpose of this program is to invite these professionals in and give an overview of where we’re at in terms of developing the program,” said Laurel Smerch, PCC Southwest’s coordinator for natural resources. She added that PCC invites input.
According to Smerch, Colorado Senate Bill 23-205 was proposed to help create scholarship programs for high-priority, postsecondary pathways like forestry and to provide funding for PCC and other schools to develop programs.
“There’s a pretty high demand for people to do forestry work and wildland firefighting,” Smerch said.
PCC is developing introductory forestry courses and other offerings for the spring semester.
Kevin Aten, interim campus administrator, described how the simulator can help students learn.
“It’s a mix of video games and real world operation,” he said. “More and more forestry and construction companies are having to go out and buy these things at a quarter of a million dollars because it’s hard to put a person on a piece of equipment where they may do thousands of dollars worth of damage if they don’t know how to run it. … We can use it in our construction program, in our forestry program.”
Smerch said they hope to publicize the program.
“With any new program, it’s getting the word out publicly and working with our industry partners,” Smerch said.
“This isn’t just a job, Aten said. “This is a lifelong career. And in a place where our natural resources are so important … we’re really excited to offer this.”
