The Association of Community College Trustees has designated April as Community College Month. Tera Pickens, Director of the Kirkwood Washington County Regional Center, spoke with KCII News about the school’s role in the pursuit of secondary education, “Kirkwood’s mission statement is to provide access to quality education and training and offering personalized support for all of our students while being able to respond to the evolving needs of the community. As an institution, we offer over 140 programs and majors. We do have a high school completion program. Students are coming in and earning their adult diploma equivalency, and then we have some free programming that’s available. Our English as Second Language (ESL), and our adult literacy. These are really great free English classes available to adult community members. Thinking that we’ve reached out 10-year milestone, we’ve had community members complete almost 700 Associate’s degrees, diplomas or certificates.”

The Kirkwood Washington County Regional Center offers many services including concurrent credit programming and career academies to local high school students. School districts in the agreement include Washington, Mid-Prairie, Highland, Lone Tree, Keota, WACO, Hillcrest Academy, and their home school populations. Pickens shared with KCII news what those offerings to local schools entail, “The scope of what we do here in Washington is probably a lot broader than what most community members realize. We have 13 different career academies that we plan to offer for the 2025-26 school year. A career academy is a pre-determined package of exploratory courses that are aligned to a certain career pathway. We have a total of around 80 individual courses that we’re offering to our high school students. We are serving just over 230 students each year in concurrent credit programming.”

Along with career academy and concurrent credit programming, Pickens says that Kirkwood serves many students with degree opportunities on the Washington campus, main Cedar Rapids campus, and in some cases, entirely online. First day of class for the summer session is May 21st. Hear more from Pickens about opportunities for education at Kirkwood on the Jessica Yoder & Sarah Bigley with Kalona Realty Washington Page.