Students work in a class on the Central Oregon Community College Madras campus in 2015. 

Central Oregon Community College announced plans to expand its Madras campus with a new 15,000-square-foot building that will house a range of new training and education programs to help meet workforce needs in addition to increasing child care services.

The college plans to open the new Madras campus to students in the fall of 2024, and is currently seeking an architect for the project, said Jeremy Green, COCC Madras campus director.

The college’s goal is to secure a construction manager and general contractor by January or February, Green said.

The project was partially made possible by the Bean Foundation of Madras, which recently donated 26 acres of land valued at $1.5 million. This is in combination with the nonprofit’s original donation of 23 acres for the existing COCC Madras campus.

The rest of the money will come from $3 million in matched funding secured through private and local sources and $5.9 million through federal, state and other public resources.

“COCC is excited to be able to advance its offerings in the Jefferson County area, Madras community, and Warm Springs, as a way to help rise the tide of the community as a whole,” Green said of the expansion. “Our approach to this isn’t ‘here are some staple offerings of COCC’. It is more, ‘what does the community need? and how can we help meet the needs of the community through educational opportunities?’”

The expansion is meant to help address three of the largest workforce and community needs in Central Oregon and the state as a whole, including well-trained early childhood education workers, health care workers and affordable child care. To address these needs, the college will bring several of its most successful programs to Madras including its early childhood education, nursing, nursing assisting and medical assisting programs.

“We are obviously thrilled with any efforts to increase the capacity of the higher education system to produce more health care workers,” said Lisa Goodman, spokeswoman for St. Charles Health System. “The health care industry is experiencing a critical shortage of workers, and any efforts locally to help train more people to go into this field is exciting and welcome news.”

The new Madras building will also house a new child care center called the Children’s Learning Center, which will increase the number of child care slots in the region while also providing students with hands-on educational opportunities.

“One hundred additional child care slots in Madras will have a huge impact on the community,” Green said. “There will be a close connection between COCC students in the early child care education program and the Children’s Learning Center.”

The children’s center, which is the college’s contracted care provider, will operate a program for infants through preschool-age children, in addition to serving as a workforce development center for future early childhood educators.

“That to me is the most glowing need in this community, child care,” Jefferson County Commissioner Kelly Simmelink said. “There are a lot of people who would like to be working but they can’t because they don’t have child care … I think it’s huge. Anything I can do to help support that will be a main focus for me.”

The mayor of Madras, Richard Ladeby, said Madras is a growing community that will benefit greatly from the college’s expansion, providing more local educational opportunities for families with children planning to go to college.

“Our community is growing. We are building houses like crazy, and people are moving into here,” Ladeby said. “But on the same token people who are moving in here whose children are going to high school and planning to go to college, it will give them the option to stay in the area.”

Ladeby is specially optimistic about the college’s child care program.

“I think it is an excellent program allowing those adults or parents to be able to go school when normally they would not be able to do so,” Ladeby said. “And child care is a huge need, and it doesn’t matter if you are a single parent or a couple you can’t leave a child at home by themselves.”

The new college building will also house classrooms, labs for health careers and science programs, classrooms equipped with streaming technology for remote instruction, a community multipurpose room, a family literacy space, offices and a break room.

“COCC has met with business and community leaders in Madras over the last few years, and all of our partners have identified the lack of child care and the lack of both health care staff and child educators among the community’s gravest needs,” said Dr. Laurie Chesley, college president. “This new college facility in Madras will help meet those needs for the long term, supporting local students, employers and their families.”