In Coal Country, Community Colleges Try to Revive a Struggling Economy

Tony Bowling was born in Eastern Kentucky at a time when coal was king. His father was a miner and he was one, too. Familiar with the booms and busts of the industry, he didn’t panic when mines laid off workers. He knew the jobs would come back.

That changed in 2012 when he was let go from Perry County Coal. His friends chased coal jobs elsewhere. But Mr. Bowling, in his mid 40s, felt too old to take that path and his family did not want to leave. So the former electrician worked odd jobs for cash and dug into his savings. By the time he set foot on the campus of Hazard Community and Technical College in 2014 he was a couple months away from being flat broke.

Fortunately he landed in a program designed for him. Along with two dozen other former miners, he trained to become a lineman, climbing utility poles to install and repair electrical power lines. It was a scary transition: from working 500 feet underground to 40 feet above, going from pitch black to blazing sun. But his electrical skills, as well as the program’s familiar emphasis on safety and teamwork, smoothed the transition. Today he works in Ohio, driving home three-and-a-half hours to the little town of Big Creek on Friday night to spend weekends with his family. The pay is good and he has turned down several offers to return to mining. “For my family it’s all about the stability,” he says. “And I never, ever felt that in the coal mines.”

Mr. Bowling is a local success story, but his experience highlights some of the challenges facing work-force retraining in rural and declining communities. As manufacturers shed workers and businesses gravitate to urban areas, they often leave economic devastation in their wake. Thousands of people reliant on a dominant industry, in this case coal, are thrown out of work and their options are few. In the hills and hollows of Eastern Kentucky, communities must also contend with low levels of education, high rates of poverty, weak infrastructure, and an opioid epidemic.

Community colleges like Hazard are working overtime to confront these issues, creating programs for students who struggle academically, socially, and financially. They are also collaborating with local employers, work-force development agencies, and economic-development coalitions to bring new jobs to the region. But while they are making inroads into fields like health care, information technology, and telework, few of those positions pay well. And those that do, like lineworkers, often require people to move or to travel great distances, as Mr. Bowling does.

“It kind of feels like we’re training people for jobs for the future,” says Jennifer Lindon, president of Hazard, which serves some of the poorest counties in the nation. “But we’re also trying to create the jobs at the same time.”

A Path to Work

Coal’s roller coaster ride in Eastern Kentucky can overshadow the fact that it has long been an industry in decline. In 1950 it employed 67,000 workers in the region. By the turn of the century that figure had dropped to 15,000.

When the most recent waves of layoffs began about a decade ago, many miners who stayed in the area resisted the idea of retraining. Having seen booms and busts before, they decided to wait it out, using up unemployment benefits in the process. Or, if they enrolled in a community-college course, they might drop out in the middle of a program if a mine job appeared.

But in the last decade, the regional economy, already weak, went into free fall. Between 2011 and 2014, about half of the coal miners found themselves out of work, while the region shed 8,000 jobs, representing $576 million in lost wages. Restaurants, schools, service stations, machine-repair shops, and other small businesses were hit hard. For every one coal job eliminated three additional jobs have been lost, according to the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, or EKCEP, a nonprofit work-force development agency.

Since 2006, an estimated 24,000 people have left the region and the work force has declined by 20 percent. For those who stayed, most alternatives to coal are bleak: minimum-wage jobs at places like Dollar General and Pizza Hut, or part-time work doing logging, carpentry, or machine repair. Many miners’ wives, who previously didn’t need to work, found themselves in entry-level jobs. “The whole family dynamic is shifting,” says Beth Kuhn, commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Workforce Investment.

Community college represents the best hope to many in a region where only 19 percent of the work force holds an associate degree or higher, and the labor-force participation rate hovers around 45 percent.

To help students find work quickly, community colleges have created short, focused programs that give people the credentials to land a job. “If you have a family and a mortgage and a car payment and you’re trying to live on unemployment or some subsidy, most of the culture here is, We want to work,” says Vic Adams, president of Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College. “You’re not going to get a coal miner to come in here and spend two years to get an associate’s degree.”

Some programs are as short as five weeks, giving skilled miners, who essentially learned on the job, the credentials they need in electrical repair, truck driving, and other fields to seek employment outside the mines.

Colleges have also embedded adult education into technical programs to serve students who can’t pass placement exams or lack a high-school diploma. These programs combine developmental education in areas such as math with skills training in areas such as allied health or industrial maintenance. With close monitoring and support, the completion rate in some of these certificate programs has been about 75 percent, says Mr. Adams.

The electrical lineman training program has been one of the area’s biggest successes. Through foundation and other grants, Hazard and other colleges have trained hundreds of former miners and others, with high placement rates and starting hourly wages of around $20.

But the lineman program is relatively small and costly. And the tidal wave of laid-off workers has overwhelmed the local economy: There simply aren’t enough jobs to go around. While EKCEP, the work-force development agency, has served more than 3,200 laid-off miners in the region since 2012, overall unemployment remains high.

Community colleges and their work-force development partners see health care and technology as holding the best potential for offering more — if lower-paying — jobs for residents.

The health-care industry is now a leading — and growing — employer in much of Eastern Kentucky. Area hospitals and clinics need to fill a range of jobs, including repair workers, medical-records technicians, and certified nursing assistants, says Kelli Hall Chaney, dean of career education and work-force development at Big Sandy Community and Technical College. Together with a nearby medical center, Big Sandy recently created a 10-week course in which students earn a series of credentials that can position them for jobs such as phlebotomists and pharmacy technicians. In three days of advertising on social media, she says, more than 300 people registered for the program.

Another program called EPIC, designed with help from a federal work-force training grant, has enrolled 1,900 people in medical information technology and computer information technology programs since it began in 2015. The competency-based programs are run largely online, a boon in an area where transportation is difficult and students often have jobs and family responsibilities.

EPIC is one of several community-college programs that come with support services, which have proved to be critically important in such a high-need region. Meagan Brock, a student-success coach, has helped students find day care, internet connections, and money for electric bills. She also helps them with soft skills, like writing professional emails to their instructors. The jobs they are gunning for may only start at $10 an hour, but she doesn’t have many dropouts. “You have students,” she says, “who are really determined.”

Uncertain Future

Meanwhile, state and regional leaders wrestle with a pressing challenge: Can they bring decent jobs to an area that lacks the infrastructure, education levels, and geography to support large manufacturers and skilled jobs? In 2014 the average annual wage for a coal miner in Kentucky was $72,000. Nothing has come along since to replace that. A recent work-force analysis by EKCEP, the regional employment agency, found that many residents are discouraged, willing to work for relatively low wages or endure long commutes for a job.

“A lot of what you see in terms of opioid abuse, a decrease in life expectancy, a lot of that is being driven by the hopelessness of seeing jobs, but not good jobs,” says Nate Anderson, who spends a lot of time in Kentucky as a senior director at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit organization that promotes skills training and job opportunities for low-income people. “No one wants to spend their entire life in retail earning next to nothing. They want opportunity and that’s gone.”

Newer groups such as One East Kentucky and Shaping Our Appalachian Region, or SOAR, are giving some cause for optimism. They’re trying to overcome entrenched parochialism by connecting business, government, and education to work on multiple fronts simultaneously, like bringing broadband to the region while training people to become fiber-optic technicians. One East Kentucky, led by the state Chamber of Commerce, aims to create 2,500 jobs that meet or exceed the state’s annual average wage of $42,000.

SOAR, established in 2013 by political and business leaders to promote innovation and put coal miners back to work, has encouraged entrepreneurship and tax incentives for business development, TechHire Eastern Kentucky, or TEKY, another regional collaboration, aims to bring skilled technology jobs to the region.

Community colleges are an integral part of these plans, linking work-force training to future jobs. Big Sandy, for example, created a business incubator for advanced manufacturing, connecting its first business, American Metal Works, to funding partners and other resources, says Ms. Chaney. And it houses a coding boot camp through TEKY.

It’s too early to say whether these newer initiatives can make up for the large job losses in recent years and stem the region’s decline. Some locals are skeptical. “I wish them luck,” says Mr. Bowling, the former miner, of those touting Eastern Kentucky’s recovery. “But I don’t know what industry would want to come into Eastern Kentucky, given the limited access they have and the limited work force.”

All six of his children see the future in health care. One is considering becoming an anesthesiologist, another an ob-gyn. One does medical transcription. And his two oldest are nurses living in Cincinnati.

As soon as his youngest graduates high school, Mr. Bowling says, he plans to relocate to Ohio.

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.