Published on 10/21/2015
The Press Democrat | October 21, 2015
By Jeremy Hay
The students from Analy High School’s automotive and electromechanical technologies class trooped from one room into another in Switch Vehicles’ Sebastopol workshop, where a control box for an electrical car was being assembled.
“When you guys see this in here, we are going to build it in class,” their teacher, Sean Fleming, called out. “It’s going to look great on a college application.”
Each vehicle kit costs about $32,000, said Kathy Goodacre, executive director of the Sonoma County-based CTE Foundation, which worked with the county office of education to design the bidding process through which the schools were selected. The foundation, which focuses on trying to align education with the needs of the economy and workforce, is also managing the $150,000 donation from Sonoma Clean Power that got the project, under discussion for about a year, off the ground.
