GREEN RIVER COMMUNITY COLLEGE RECEIVES GRANT

On November 13, 2014, the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA) announced that the Green River Community College Court Reporting program was awarded a five-year grant, worth nearly $555,000.

The funding is part of the training for realtime writers. The grant is under the Higher Education Act passed by Congress in 2009.

Green River Community College is located in Auburn, Washington. The court reporting program offers careers in courtroom/freelance court reporting, broadcast/sports captioning, educational captioning and realtime webcasting.

According to Sidney Weldele-Wallace, CRI, CPR, project manager and chair of the college’s business division, the funding will support two main goals. The two main goals are increasing enrollment numbers and improve student learning.

Increasing student enrollment will be targeted through a nine-month introductory course, a series taught at a regional center that annually provides career and technical secondary education. This spans to more than 700 students and five area high school districts. The grant funding will support marketing of realtime careers to high school students seeking a career and technical training. The equipment purchases for a dedicated classroom offer beginning theory classes and on-site instruction.

Students will earn both college credit and credit toward high school graduation and upon graduation can continue their training through the program’s regular classroom courses or online.

Green River Community College has students trained in state-of-the-art classrooms, while online students receive direct feeds and live broadcasts from classrooms. Green River also operates a dedicated four-station captioning suite for hands-on training for students pursuing broadcast and CART Captioning.

“The grant provides an exceptional opportunity for Green River’s Computer Reporting Technologies program to build strategic partnerships both on and off campus to promote training of individuals as realtime writers through implementation of the Career Pathway to Realtime Writing (“Pathway”) Project,” Weldele-Wallace stated.

Green River previously received a realtime grant that was primarily used to support need-based scholarships and to implement a cohort model for new students back in 2012.

For more information please visit http://www.greenriver.edu/