Suffolk Community College Gets $1.67M Grant

By Olivia Winslow, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Mar. 13–Suffolk County Community College has received a second federal Department of Labor grant, this one worth nearly $1.67 million over three years, to develop manufacturing training programs to help fill skills gaps in the local labor force.

“This grant addresses the training and certification of those skilled labor forces,” said John Lombardo, director of corporate training at the college, citing national shortages of welders, machinists and sheet metal workers. “It’s an inherent problem around the country.”

Lombardo said the highly skilled jobs require workers who can operate the computerized equipment involved.

“Equipment today is much more computer-controlled than it was 20 years ago,” Lombardo said, citing, for example, the need for workers to know how to adjust a microprocessor that controls the heat and depth of a welding instrument.

“It’s very high-tech,” said Henry Kleitsch, president of a machine shop company, H&H Technologies in Bohemia, and of a Copiague sheet metal fabricator, Tatra Industries.

“Everything is done on computers,” said Kleitsch, who helped advise Suffolk on its grant application. “The worker has to have knowledge of programming and also how to manipulate the program to get the part to come out correctly.”

Kleitsch said local companies in need of skilled manufacturing workers have been forced to go overseas. “If people are readily available, I think companies would be more inclined to stay here.”

Lombardo said Suffolk’s program should be in full operation by next year and would begin later this year by training teachers for the new classes. The college also will train technology teachers in the William Floyd school district, part of its emphasis to reach out to high school students to create a manufacturing workers “pipeline.”

A previous $2.4-million Labor Department grant, the first installment of which was received in 2005, was used by Suffolk to develop an Advanced Mechatronics Training program, which trains students and workers on sophisticated equipment in such industries as aerospace, medical equipment and homeland security.

Lombardo pointed to a 2004 study that found “skills gaps” on the Island in these and other high-tech manufacturing areas.

Suffolk is one of 69 community colleges and community-based institutions nationwide that won the new grants, of 341 that applied, the Labor Department said.

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