Hunt Midwest pledges up to $2 million for career and technical school in KC’s northland
Hunt Midwest has pledged up to $2 million to the Platte County School District for the construction of a new $60 million career and technical school in Kansas City’s northland.
The school district in October kicked off a capital fundraising campaign for the new Northland Workforce Development Center, which will help address the shortage of qualified workers in trades and skilled positions across the Kansas City region.
The pledge from Hunt Midwest is the first private contribution since Missouri appropriated $30 million for the center in it’s 2023 fiscal year budget.
“This donation is a great first step in building a brighter future for tomorrow across the Northland,” said Superintendent Jay Harris for Platte County School District in a news release.
The new center will replace the district’s Northland Career Center, which attracts nearly 500 students from 16 high schools across Clay and Platte counties. It offers training in skilled trades including construction, heating and cooling, robotics, welding, health sciences and culinary arts.
The current center was built in 1979 and has outgrown its Platte City campus. Hundreds of qualified students have been turned away over the past three years and the center now has more students on its programs’ waiting lists than students currently enrolled.
The new state-of-the art facility will be centrally located to both Clay and Platte counties near Missouri 152. It will be more than double the size of the current campus and equipped to more closely simulate the work environments students will face when they graduate.
Hunt Midwest, which in May announced plans to develop the 3,300 acre KCI29 Logistic Park near the Kansas City International Airport, plans to contribute 10 cents per square foot of building space at the megasite to the Northland Workforce Development Center as each industrial facility opens up — up to $2 million in total.
“We already believed in the work of the Northland Career Center, and when we saw they received the $30 million in funding from the state for the new center, we talked with district leaders right away to figure out what it would take to leverage those dollars to make the new center a reality,” said Aaron Schmidt, Hunt Midwest’s vice president of development and construction, in the news release.
The company is also partnering with the district to offer more internships to heating and air conditioning students at its SubTropolis underground business complex, where nearly 500 HVAC units need constant maintenance.
The district hopes the new career center will attract more industry partnerships in the coming years. The district will continue to raise the remaining matching funds through it’s capital campaign throughout this year. Preliminary designs for the new campus are underway with construction planned to be completed by the end of 2026.
This story was originally published January 5, 2023 at 8:13 AM.
