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Opinion: Mayor Wamp is right that Chattanooga needs a big new downtown vocational/technical high school

The Moultrie Observer / High school students across the region showcased Nov. 8, 2022, what they’ve learned in the vocational classroom during the plumbing challenge at this year's South-Southwest Skills Challenge in Moultrie, Ga. Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp is pushing a large downtown vocational and technical school in Chattanooga.
The Moultrie Observer / High school students across the region showcased Nov. 8, 2022, what they’ve learned in the vocational classroom during the plumbing challenge at this year's South-Southwest Skills Challenge in Moultrie, Ga. Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp is pushing a large downtown vocational and technical school in Chattanooga. The Moultrie Observer / High school students across the region showcased Nov. 8, 2022, what they’ve learned in the vocational classroom during the plumbing challenge at this year's South-Southwest Skills Challenge in Moultrie, Ga. Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp is pushing a large downtown vocational and technical school in Chattanooga.

By Pam Sohn 4 min read

We’ve heard it before and we’ll likely hear it many more times: Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp say’s he’ll keep pushing in this coming year to build a vocational and technical high school in downtown Chattanooga where a new high school hasn’t been built in more than 60 years.

We hope he does. And we hope he succeeds. We need it.

Not since Kirkman Vocational Technical High School operated downtown near where the Lookouts now play baseball overlooking the Tennessee River and the smattering of hotels there now have we had a school that actually taught the majority of our kids something they could use to make a living for themselves and a family.

Sure, our high schools of today teach math and grammar and history. But have you ever tried to build a doghouse with conjugated verbs and an algebraic equation? ax² + bx + c = 0?

And frankly we’re not even doing that well at teaching run, running, ran and have run. Our youngsters’ standardized ACT test scores, used for college admission, dropped again. The nation’s 2022 class averaged 19.8 as an ACT composite score. Perfect is 36. This marked the first time since 1991 that the average score was below 20.