THOMASVILLE- The Thomasville Rotary Club heard an update from the Thomasville-Thomas County Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Andrea Collins this past week on the workforce development plan and how multiple agencies have come together to help develop a workforce pipeline.
In 2022, the Chamber secured a grant from the Williams Foundation through the Thomasville Community Resource Center. The grant brought the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education into the community, which studies education through the lens of economic development.
Project leader Merril Wilcox visited Thomasville in 2022 to see where students struggled post-COVID-19.
“We didn’t really know,” Collins said. “A lot of our members and organizations were getting ready for strategic planning, but didn’t know where we were at after 2020.”
Wilcox spent a year in Thomasville, identifying five pinch points that Thomasville could focus on as it relates to the birth to workforce pipeline.
In 2023, the pinch points were presented to various groups and clubs, allowing those in attendance to sign up to help with the focused areas of need if they were interested.
Once signed up, the committees began developing plans of action that would be used through 2025 during the implementation phase.
The committees focused on communications and relationships, which Collins said was the hardest pinch point to address.
“As you know, we are all humans and equally broken,” she said. “Sometimes, we don’t always get it right. But, this committee has really focused on how to mitigate some of the challenges identified.”
Some of the challenges were gaps in communication between city and county government, along with city and county schools.
While Collins knew the committee would not resolve all communication issues, the group attempted to create a safe place for civic-minded conversations.
Key individuals were trained in reflective structure dialogue, allowing them to pose questions to city, county, and school officials non-threateningly.
The second pinch point focused on was early care and learning.
“What we realized is that for every five children under the age of 5, our community has one childcare slot and we didn’t know that,” she said. “It was astonishing. We knew child care was a challenge, but we never had the data to back it up.”
Committees tried to encourage local businesses to take advantage of childcare tax credits but ended up being awarded a $750,000 grant by the Department of Early Care and Learning.
The grant was specific to non-traditional childcare hours.
Thomasville has several industries including the hospitality industry and Archbold, who have to figure out how to support their workforce in non-traditional times.
The grant allowed the Chamber to partner with childcare providers to extend hours of service to include non-traditional hours.
Since the grant, three in-home providers have now become Quality Rated and are offering services to parents on shift work.
Along with early care and learning, literacy by third grade was a pinch point that Wilcox had noted.
“It’s no surprise that we had a challenge with some of our students that were in early learning, Pre-K, 1st, and 2nd grade,” Collins said. “By the time they got to third grade, they were really beginners.”
Collins explained that most children learn to read up until third grade. After third grade, children read to learn.
“If we have a majority of our future workforce, our citizens that are in K-2nd and can’t read, but are being passed through then that is our workforce in the future,” she said. “The probability of them dropping out of high school increases tremendously and it is also how they forecast for prison beds.”
To help with the issue, the Committee joined forces with Literacy for Thomas County to strengthen their efforts.
Through a combination of funds from Family Connections, both committees have helped with the Parent/Child Plus program, which teaches mothers who never learned to read how to memorize and read a book, so they can then read it to their child.
After focusing on literacy levels, committees then turned their attention to pipelines to post-secondary education.
“We found that 40 percent of adults in our community either graduated with a high school diploma and started some form of post-secondary education or got their GED and started some form of post-secondary education, but never finished their credential for whatever reason,” she said.
Through their studies, the committee has found that success equals different things to different people and students are now interested in going to technical colleges, despite some parents’ opposition.
“The teachers and counselors are fighting against that,” Collins said. “What we are working on right now is a Georgia AIM video campaign so we can show kids and parents what exists in today’s environment.”
The final pinch point was worker barriers or the reasons preventing able-bodied individuals from entering the workforce.
“There were a lot of things discussed, but the project lead suggested we focused on a few things including affordable housing, transportation, and mental health,” Collins said.
Three groups are working to better understand these issues, including the City of Thomasville, the Vashti Center and Resilient Georgia, and the Thomasville Community Development Corporation, which focuses on affordable and community housing.
As Collins looks to the future, she and her team are focused on becoming a 501c3 organization so they can obtain more grants to better help with all the designated pinch points.