Oregon school officials have joined with five area school districts urging Madison Area Technical College to build a new campus in either Fitchburg or Verona.
MATC has been looking to expand to the west or southwest of Madison for a couple years. And in recent months, six school districts - Oregon, Verona, Belleville, Mount Horeb, McFarland and Middleton-Cross Plains - have begun piecing together a plan for how an MATC campus could serve as a magnet for area high school students.
Any final decision is still many months off. But if the consortium succeeds, Oregon High School students could benefit, said Superintendent Brian Busler, as they'd have better access to the highly specialized courses MATC can offer, as well as more opportunities to earn college-level credits.
"If we want to offer really specialized courses, this is a cost-effective way for us to do it," Busler said.
Currently, OHS students can study and earn credits at MATC in a variety of classes, such as EMT training or nursing courses. But most of MATC's courses are offered at its Truax campus on Madison's northeast side, making for long - and increasingly expensive - commutes for kids. And those classes often fill up before Oregon kids can enroll, said OHS school-to-career coordinator Bill Urban.
If MATC built a campus in nearby Verona or Fitchburg, more OHS kids would likely be able to sign up, Busler said.
Last week, officials from the six school districts met and settled a few details, including a potential name - "The Global Academy" - and the four "career clusters" that would be offered through the new campus, Busler said.
Those clusters, which are defined by the state Department of Public Instruction, would include the fields of "health services," "information technology," "architecture and construction" and "science, technology, engineering and mathematics."
Locating the new campus in the Verona Area School District (which includes both Verona and large sections of Fitchburg) makes sense because it's centrally located between the six-district consortium, Busler said.
Exactly where a new campus would go is still undetermined, but Verona school officials have spoken with several landowners interested in selling land for MATC to build on.
Funding is also an unknown, though one preferred possibility would be for the consortium to pay for the new campus and have MATC pay off the districts' debt each year through a lease agreement, thus eliminating the need for a referendum, Verona Superintendent Dean Gorrell explained last month.
MATC officials told Gorrell last month that they were "very interested" in the consortium's ideas.
While the proposal has a ways to go, Busler hopes current plans come to fruition within 18 months to two years. And with more students opting for technical college after graduation these days, the sooner the better, he said.
"Basically, we'd be offering programs we can't offer in our home schools," Busler said. "That'd be a good thing for kids."
To help flesh out their proposal, officials from the six districts have toured similar sites, including a tour in May of the Technology Center of DuPage County near Chicago. That campus draws about 1,400 kids from 23 high schools and allows students to earn credits for both high school and associate's degrees or specialized certifications.
