Skills on display

Job Corps hosts open house

MOSES LAKE — Dylan Sanders credits Job Corps with showing him a path forward. “I graduated high school and I wasn’t really doing much,” Sanders said. “I was working at Walmart as a cashier, but that’s not really what I wanted to do. I wanted to get an education, but I didn’t want to go to college. I heard about Job Corps and (I looked into it) and saw they offered computer networking, which is exactly what I wanted to do.” Sanders was representing the Computer Networking program at an open house Wednesday at the Columbia Basin Job Corps Center in Moses Lake, giving visiting students an idea of what Job Corps has to offer. About 200 students from high schools around central Washington had come through the open house in the first hour and a half, Community Liaison Susan Mann said. Students took a tour of the campus, located in the Larson area across from Big Bend Community College, and then fanned out among tables and displays, inside and out, where current students told them about the programs the center offers. Students from the construction trades – plastering, carpentry, cement masonry – had small workspaces set up in the closed-off driveway to demonstrate the skills they were gaining.