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A lot of school districts say they want to train future employees of area manufacturing companies.
Chautauqua Lake Central School has done more than just talk about training employees — the district has made it a cornerstone of its curriculum.
What began as a lunchtime club years ago has grown into the Baker Stuart Manufacturing Complex, which the school hopes to utilize to provide students from across the county with additional manufacturing opportunities. The recently opened Baker Stuart Manufacturing Complex provides students at Chautauqua Lake with opportunities to learn and “gain valuable experiences” through state of the art technology in plastics, wood and composite production. The space embodies a STEM lab manufacturing environment where rapid prototyping, CAD and CAM programming and machining, and full scale production processes can be emulated by students.
Superintendent Josh Liddell said the school’s goal has always been to provide the program both for Chautauqua Lake students and for students across the county. Students from Maple Grove, Brocton and Fredonia have already taken advantage of the manufacturing program, which also has a partnership with Rochester Institute of Technology and Jamestown Community College. Chautauqua Lake is offering six courses certified by RIT, meaning students can complete a full semester of RIT college credits. and can also obtain more than a semester of college credits from JCC.
This is an outstanding program that likely wouldn’t have come together without the work of Randy Stuart, founder of Stuart Tool and Die, and Baker, CEO of Jamestown Plastics and a fomer Chautauqua Lake Central School board president who also helped shepherd the merger of Chautauqua Lake and Mayville central schools into CLCS during his time on the board. It’s easy to lament the shackles the state can put on public schools, but Stuart and Baker have shown schools can meet the needs of the business community if there is a true give-and-take relationship between the two.
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