If you’ve followed Cecil County news for any amount of time, you’ve surely read a few stories about the new Cecil County School of Technology. For a while, many of those stories were about the contentious debate over purchasing the former Bassell property on Appleton Rd. in Elkton. As the renovation project neared completion, the storylines were about the final students attending the old North East location or anticipating the arrival of the new school’s first students in August. In the last few weeks, we’ve read about the ribbon cutting celebrating the official opening of the school and the open house for county sophomores considering technology education for their junior year.

New School of Technology was a Long Time Coming

The story of the School of Technology began more than a decade ago when Cecil County Public Schools identified the need to replace the building housing its technology education programs. Initially planned as a “comprehensive high school” where students would spend their whole day, the project was eventually scaled back to the format Cecil County has been using where students start their days at their home school for a few classes like English and are then bused to the technical school for the rest of their classes.

Once the property purchase was final and the county’s commitment to fund the project was secured in 2013, renovations moved quickly. Despite what others may say loudly and repeatedly, CCPS continues to be resourceful and demonstrated exceptional “out of the box” thinking on this project as they envisioned a building that once housed laboratories being fitted out for technical education. By re-purposing an existing building and using as much of its existing infrastructure a possible, they completed the project at a cost of $68 per square foot. To put that into perspective, the Dorchester County Career and Technology Center cost $247 per square foot when it was built in 2008.

More Space=More Students Served

The new School of Technology facility will allow enrollment to swell to twice its current size when the new class arrives on campus this winter. Those arriving students will have the opportunity to participate in new programs like interactive media productions, criminal justice and homeland security, and computer networking and other new programs are planned for future expansion.

For more information about the Cecil County School of Technology, visit their website.

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