PORT ANGELES — To retain its state accreditation as a full-time skills center, the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center must achieve a minimum full-time equivalent enrollment of 150 students.
It’s currently 34 students short of that benchmark because of Peninsula school district’s seeing declining enrollment and pressures on districts to improve on state test results.
The vocational school designed for students ages 16 to 21 hasn’t gotten off to a good start this year and has had to suspend courses because of insufficient enrollment.
According to Clyde Rasmussen, the skills center’s director, the first population count of the school year showed a full-time equivalent enrollment of 116 students.
Last year, it fell short of the 150-student mark by three students.
“We’re down in all of our programs,” Rasmussen said Friday.
“We’ve got room to take in a lot more people.”
The North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center’s headquarters sits in the Lincoln Center at the corner of Eighth and B streets.
Completed in 2003, construction cost $5.7 million, all paid for with state funds.
An additional $1.3 million — also state money — was spent on the recently opened skills center technology annex, which opened Sept. 6.
A composites class was going to be offered in a wing of the new technology center this semester.
But too few students forced suspension of that course, Rasmussen said.
It’s not the only class on the chopping block, however.
A law and justice course needs at least 16 students for officials to offer it, but only four students enrolled.
“If we get enough students for our law and justice program, or for a second session of composites, we will run those,” Rasmussen said.
In Forks, a medical careers course offered in partnership with Quillayute Valley School District has been suspended, as has the culinary arts program in Sequim.
In Port Angeles, one of the culinary arts program’s instructors was reduced to half-time because of too few students.