The wood basket of the world, suffering a shortage in experienced loggers has resulted in Coastal Pines Technical College in Waycross, Ga., creating a curriculum designed to teach high schoolers the basics of forestry and timber harvesting. CPTC forestry instructor Tommy Peagler, working with the Georgia Forestry Commission and multiple sponsors, orchestrated the program that is now in its fourth year. According to Peagler, with the Southeast accounting for more timber production than anywhere else in the world, it is an opportunity to fill seats in logging equipment with quality employees.
The two-phased class offers 12 hours of course work in the fundamentals of forestry that bestows a technical certificate of credit that makes the student eligible to participate in the operations portion of the class.
“The whole idea was that a lot of people that are getting into the logging business really don’t understand it as a whole,” Peagler says. “They don’t understand hydraulics, safety issues, heat, land lines or even identifying a line tree.”
The program is also gaining international recognition. Four United Kingdom students plus two instructors are in attendance. “I have been here just over a week,” George Fenton, a first-year forestry student at Newton Rigg Agricultural College in the UK, says. “All the different tree species, the machinery, the harvesting, it’s all different than the UK. It’s currently 55 degrees In the UK right now so the temperature difference is huge, but I like the warm weather.”
“I think this program is absolutely fantastic,” instructor from UK Martin Davies says. “It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen from the U.S., UK and Europe. We try to spend as much time as possible in the woods. It’s great the way they run the updated equipment and we spend a good amount of time on each machine.” One difference between the two countries Martin picked up on quickly: the scale of the land and the size of the trucks. “They have trucks in the UK but not like you guys do,” he says.
“Labor is challenging, trying to find someone new,” says Van McLoon, a Tidewater sales rep who’s worked some with this year’s class and fed the group a Deep South barbecue lunch one day the first week. Tidewater has been sponsoring the program since its beginning. “There’s no one knocking on the door trying to get into it,” McLoon says about the logging industry. “We want to see more personnel, the logging force is getting older,” he adds.
All of these community partners are thrilled to help out because they know we need these workers. They get a unique perspective to come out and see first-hand how these students are performing, CPTC marketing coordinator Lauralee Beauregard says. “Our communities came to us and said we had a shortage of technical workers, “she adds. “As it stands right now, we are still building the program but we always have good enrollment in this program because there is a ton of people that need jobs and the work is there.”