By Savannah Morgan 

intern@salisburypost.com

SALISBURY — Salisbury High School has won a $700,000 grant from the Golden Leaf Foundation to help expand its career and technical education program.

Superintendent Lynn Moody made the announcement at Monday night’s Rowan-Salisbury Board of Education meeting.

Mandy Mills, career and technical education director for the school system, had first announced the application at school board meeting on April 24.

Salisbury High will start an advanced manufacturing CTE program next school year. The program will include engineering, mechatronics and metals manufacturing. It would have been introduced regardless of whether the grant was approved, but machining classes were contingent on the grant.

Other programs set to expand include North Rowan High School’s health sciences program next year; East Rowan High’s information technology program in 2018-19; and South Rowan High’s global logistics program in 2019-20.

Dean Hunter, a school board member, asked about providing transportation for students who may want to take a CTE class offered at a different school.

“The issue would be if we prevent someone at West from taking something offered at North,” Hunter said. “I would like to see that we are offering transportation so that no student gets left behind in regards to CTEs.”

Providing transportation between schools would encourage students interested in a CTE program to pursue it, he said. Hunter asked the board to be proactive on transportation in future meetings.

The board also discussed a future consolidation of CTE classes into one building, similar to the Career Academy and Technical School in the Iredell-Statesville school district.

Having a vocational school in a central location might prove easier for students, parents and the school system as a whole, board members said.

Future discussion of a CTE or vocational school would be contingent on more information about costs, space needs, the range of classes offered and transportation, they said.

“The only reason we couldn’t do it would be dollars,” said Moody.” If we can identify how we are going to pay for it, we would love to do it.”

Board members asked that Mills determine a cost estimate on a CTE school so that they can consider the issue in subsequent meetings.

“It’s time to start thinking about how this can happen, not why it can’t,” Hunter said.