Last Friday, a ribbon cutting ceremony was hosted at Donaldsonville High School to announce a collaboration between the Ascension Parish School Board and River Parishes Community College. 

The college and school system have renovated a previously unused wing of Donaldsonville High School into a high school equivalency and job readiness training center for the city's adults.

This center is now being called the Westbank Workforce Training Center.

The new high school center will open to adults this spring. The college is excited to announce the adult education classes already have a waiting list. 

This new training center now has two large spaces for training in welding, process technology and electrical instrumentation and two classrooms with laptops and other training materials.

The welding area is outfitted with 10 bays, each with a roughly $13,000 Lincoln electric arc welding machine. One larger diesel-powered welding machine also in the space can be used for projects in the field.

Jeremy Whittemore, RPCC's dean of applied sciences stated that the colleges instructors will be teaching at this new training center. To learn more about this project, visit The Advocate, Pelican Post, or The Donaldsonville Chief.