How to earn $40,000-plus right out of Lonoke High

Lonoke High School students will spend part of their school days being taught to fix tractors by a tractor dealership, and when they graduate they can work for it at a starting salary of $40,000 plus performance bonuses. Within about a year, they can be earning $60,000 to $80,000.

The arrangement is the result of a unique partnership between the school, the state, and the family-owned Greenway John Deere dealerships. Greenway has 27 locations in Arkansas and five in southeastern Missouri.

Greenway is spending $1.5 million to start the program, a cost that includes supplying the instructor as well as providing the curriculum, which it wrote. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced the state Office of Skills Development was kicking in another $1.2 million in an appearance at Lonoke Friday.

Why is Greenway spending that money? At any given time, it’s searching for at least 30 service technicians, said Jared Field, Greenway training manager. Now it will try to grow its own in Lonoke, a farming community where about 30% to 35% of high school graduates will attend college.

Field said it typically takes an adult trainee about two years to become a John Deere technician. The students will do that same training their junior and senior years, earning air-conditioning, computer diagnostics, hydraulics and electrical certifications while they complete their remaining required academic courses. They’ll only lack about three months of training when they graduate high school.

The program will be limited to 24 students at a time. Students will go through an application and interview process before being accepted. They must be on course to graduate.

The dealership’s $1.5 million investment and the state’s $1.2 million will ensure Lonoke’s students are working on up-to-date equipment, not some broken-down donated tractor. Field said self-driven autonomous tractors are coming soon, and the students will have access to training on them.

The program will be housed in the 30,000-squarefoot Lonoke Business Academy, which was built after voters approved a 2.5-mill increase in March 2020. The academy already has a diesel mechanics program where students can earn concurrent credit hours with Arkansas State University - Beebe, but the Greenway program will have an agricultural focus and not offer the concurrent credit. The Business Academy also teaches classes in industrial technology, agriculture, welding and rural health care.

Sanders said that during her campaign for governor, employers repeatedly told her they can’t find workers. She said this kind of public-partnership can be replicated elsewhere.

Some might question the idea of a business like Greenway working so directly with a school district to train its future employees. We do not want schools to become corporate-driven labor farms.

But what’s happening here is not indentured servitude. Students can take their share of Greenway’s $1.5 million investment and all the training it pays for, and then go work for one of its competitors when they graduate. Or they can use those skills to work somewhere else in agriculture or in a related field.

Either way, they’ll graduate high school ready for local area jobs that pay well and are currently going unfilled. They can do it without having to leave home and without acquiring college debt for a degree they may never use and often don’t ever complete. They’ll have direction.

This kind of workforce development program isn’t just happening in Lonoke. At schools across Arkansas, students are graduating with all kinds of certifications allowing them to get good jobs right out of high school, or at least be well on their way to getting a good job.

That’s a welcome change from the old model, which overemphasized memorization, regurgitation, and fouryear college degree attainment.

Lonoke Superintendent Jeff Senn said Friday that about six years ago when he worked at another district, he took his car to a repair shop and saw that a recently graduated student would be working on it. When Senn asked him how he had learned to fix cars, the young man replied “Youtube.”

That bothered Senn. He felt like the school had not properly prepared that student for his future. He also wasn’t sure the Youtube-educated mechanic was ready to fix his car.

He won’t have either concern if he ever needs a tractor fixed – not in Lonoke, anyway.