Students of the popular technical school in Coconut Creek can now say they attend a technical college.
Formerly Atlantic Technical Center, the school recently won approval from the Broward County Public School Board to change its name to Atlantic Technical College, which the school is hoping will clarify their purpose and what they can offer students.
“We in Florida have been kind of caught in between the community colleges and the universities because we are governed by the school board, which are many K to 12 entities,” School Director Bob Crawford said. “So we’ve been kind of like a school out of water in many ways, so this opportunity will help clarify our mission in the public perception of what we do.”
The school, which opened in 1973, has been working on the name change for 15 years, according to Crawford. The change is expected to help students with their perception of the school, and once they start looking for jobs, the perception of their potential employers as they look at where the students went to school.
“This change will help us redefine our whole image to the public, and what we do and the role that we can play in preparing a better quality workforce,” Crawford said. “The perception issue will help students the most. It will clarify what we can do. Our role is to try and prepare people for high-wage, high-skill, high-demand occupations, and do it as quickly as we can for as cheaply as we can. We are not a for-profit school. We are a public school, very affordable, and very accessible.”
A majority of the technical programs at Atlantic Technical College and High School can be completed in a year. Some new programs added to the school this year include business supervision management, game/ simulation/ animation programming, mental health technician, and public works.
Crawford is especially excited about the public works program since it includes partnerships with every municipality in Broward County, and some in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, to help train the students in the various public works fields. The brainchild of Margate Public Works Director Sam May, it’s a six-month program, and students will be given an internship with a city or municipality to put their classroom experience into practice.
“There are only two schools [to offer a public works program] in the state,” Crawford said, “us on the east coast and one in Pinellas County on the west coast. Because of that, municipalities were just taking people and training them on the job. But now we’ll have a program that is in conjunction with the cities and the county… They are all on board, and they can’t wait because they have such an aging out workforce.”
Atlantic Technical College also has a Technical High School on the same campus. The high school’s name will remain the same. Broward County‘s two other technical centers, McFatter in Davie and Sheridan in Hollywood, also get the name change to Technical College.
