KANNAPOLIS — Rowan-Cabarrus Community College leadership provided gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein with ways for the state to assist them when he made a stop at the Kannapolis campus on Monday.

Stein, the current state attorney general, made a stop at RCCC’s Research Campus facility as part of a tour he is undertaking to visit community colleges throughout the state. Stein said that he is visiting the schools to better understand what the community colleges need to be better equipped to educate the future and current workforce of the state and place those people into careers that provide for their families better.

One of the main points RCCC President Carol Spalding said could be improved upon were methods of funding, especially for creating programs when new industries come to town, such as RCCC’s creation of a BioWork course when Eli Lilly announced their new facility in Cabarrus County.

“Community colleges are broke. They get their tuition money and they send it back to Raleigh immediately, and that’s it. It’s hard to build a program like that, so we are on a campaign to try and get a line item in all these things that say, is there an impact to the community college that needs support? In our case on Lilly, it would be an antiseptic lab,” said Spalding

Currently, the school partners with outside companies such as Chewy, Eli Lilly and Amazon to put workers through training. RCCC Vice-President Craig Lamb explained one current program the school uses, where a company will pay for the certification of a student with the understanding that the same student will then work for the company for at least 90 days.

However, both Lamb and Spalding said that the college can be caught on the back foot when new industries come to town. Spalding’s mentioning of the antiseptic lab included her saying that building the lab would cost the college $700,000 it does not have and that the college was not able to plan for the cost because they did not know Eli Lilly was building the facility until it was publicly announced.

“Rowan County has 122 million square feet of spec buildings on their books right now, and so that’s going to result in 20,000 jobs here. The community college is sitting here saying, ‘What are the jobs?’ Nobody knows. ‘How are we going to address that?’ Nobody knows. I like to be more prepared than that,” said Spalding.

For his part, Stein dutifully took notes of all that was said and asked clarifying questions about all of the topics discussed by Spalding and Lamb. Stein also said that he would work to get an item back in the state’s budget that provided a waiver for potential students of the college. The budget item would have created a waiver for students that wished to take short-term, career-changing courses in order to work in high-need, high-wage jobs in the community.

After the tour, Stein said that he was impressed with the efforts RCCC has made to partner with local industries and fulfill the needs of those same industries.

“There are exciting things happening in terms of the connections that the community college has with local industry to make sure that the school is producing people with the skills that are needed to succeed in the workforce. There’s a really strong positive relationship between the private industry and the community college here,” said Stein.

After speaking with Stein, Lamb showed the attorney general around the college’s Advanced Technology Center, which was built in 2020. The center houses programs in the robotics, engineering and advanced technology fields.