A new Vicksburg Warren School District building will house vocational courses for junior high students among its purposes.

Trustees have voted to seek bids for an 11,000-square-foot metal structure to be built behind the maintenance shop at the central office on Mission 66.

It could go up in months and be ready for fall, Superintendent James Price said. The district’s two junior highs are nearby on Baldwin Ferry Road.

&#8220Our plan is to have a central area where these students can get away from the junior high atmosphere and be trained in job functions that would lead to entry-level positions in the community,” Price said. &#8220The coursework would be more in line with the GED program.”

The 9,200-student district has been ranked at a 38-percent dropout rate and the vocational courses starting at an earlier age are seen as a remedy.

&#8220This program is designed for those who will not likely graduate with a traditional diploma,” Price said. &#8220This is aimed at those students who historically drop out.”

Price said the building would be multipurpose and also serve as expansion space for specifically targeted student programs housed at Grove Street School.

The program will at first enable training opportunities for 10 to 15 students from each junior high, he said.

&#8220I’d like to eventually expand to 50 or 60 and offer the program to students at Grove Street, too,” he said. &#8220It won’t be producing mass numbers – likely just one here, one there. But the point is to find what these students are interested in and go from there.”

Students would be put in mock situations and learn how to make a bed and clean a hotel room, put shingles on a roof or serve customers at a restaurant, Price said.

&#8220Our vision is to make it into a work-study type of program where we can apprentice our students out in the community on a part-time basis,” he said.

The end result would likely be one of three options, Price said.

&#8220I could see a student not wanting to work anymore and going on to high school, wanting to work part time while still going to high school or wanting to work full time, and in that case we could put them in the GED program,” he said.

&#8220It would give students a taste of the real, working world, but our hope is for them to realize they don’t have to necessarily be academically successful to have tremendous value in our community. Hopefully they’ll find their talents through this program,” Price said.

Currently, about 425 students from both Vicksburg High and Warren Central High participate in the vocational-technical training program at Hinds Community College. While general vocational courses in tech prep are offered at the schools, 10th- through 12th-grade students in the program go to Hinds several times a week for hands-on training.

The 14 different vo-tech courses offer skills ranging from welding and auto mechanics to marketing, allied health and child care, said Hilton Dyar, dean of the Vicksburg Warren Branch of Hinds.

&#8220I think it’s a wonderful idea to catch kids earlier and get them thinking about what they want to do,” said Dyar. &#8220This program would do nothing but enhance our program here.”

Dyar said he’s supportive of the idea of an introduction to vo-tech programs for seventh- and eighth-graders.

&#8220I think it will get kids thinking who may have an interest in an aptitude that they can pursue more in high school,” he said. &#8220Some kids go through 13 years of public education and four years of college and it’s not until they get into their careers that they realize that’s not what they really want to do after all.”

It’s never too early to expose children to different professions, Dyar said.

&#8220I think about 25 percent of the student population knows what they want to do for a career. The others have no idea because they’re not exposed to it in the core classes,” he said. &#8220That’s what the vo-tech program is all about.”