Thursday Community Summit Focusing on Forsyth Workforce

The following letter is from Forsyth County Schools Superintendent L.C. (Buster) Evans concerning Thursday's community summit to develop a plan for recruiting, educating, training, and retaining the county's future workforce. See the attached invitation, as well   

Dear Community Leader:

Our recent district initiative called PROPEL (Pathways for Reaching Opportunities in Preparing for Excellence for Life) placed emphasis on the fact that graduation from high school is a vital component of a viable and successful community. Through this initiative, part of the recommendations which came out of the careers and relevance findings was that Forsyth County needed to better engage local employers to understand their needs in hiring qualified candidates and take a closer look at the curriculum and training needs of our students. Throughout the past several years, we’ve been doing just that which has spawned the need for an increased focus on the employment pipeline for a student in Forsyth County.

As a follow-up to these recommendations, Forsyth County Schools, University of North Georgia, Lanier Technical College, and the Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce are partnering to create a learning collaborative that:

• identifies and supports the lifelong educational needs of our community,
• revisits such things as the Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce’s Envision 2030 Report,
• looks at needs to identify and support the lifelong educational needs of our community, and
• studies other local economic development impacts in our community.

Because a collaborative cannot happen alone, our plan is to develop Georgia’s most comprehensive and innovative roadmap for developing and retaining a talented workforce with your help. Our business community and learning organizations have committed to coming together to establish the learning needs in order to provide a seamless curriculum from secondary to post-secondary which supports the workforce needs of Forsyth County – now and in the future! Our response to that is something we’re calling Workforce Forsyth!

See the invitation on the back of this letter, but please join us to start this conversation at a community summit on February 27, 2014 from 4 PM – 6 PM at the Forsyth Conference Center. Please RSVP to Valery Lang Hall (vhall@forsyth.k12.ga.us or 770-887-2461) if you can attend and also don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have. Should you not be able to attend, please send another person from your organization!

Sincerely,

L.C. (Buster) Evans Superintendent