The Cochise County Superintendent of Schools and the Garrison Commander at Fort Huachuca are teaming up to facilitate more educational and workforce opportunities in Cochise County.
Fort Huachuca Garrison Commander Col. John Ives and Cochise County Superintendent of Schools Dr. Jacqui Clay began laying the groundwork for fort-county cooperation in nurturing, retaining, and recruiting young professionals in the area.
For Dr. Clay, a retired Army sergeant in command, it’s about targeting K-20 students—students from kindergarten through college—and nurturing the relationship between school districts and the fort.
“So in a way we’re going to collect and match what’s happening in schools across the county, and partner with organizations at Fort Huachuca, so that students are validated, again,” Clay said. “Because they’re in school now, but you know, they have to look over that wall, over that wall into the world.”
“The important thing is sustainability and sustainability with our children,” she continued.
For Colonel Ives, it is about bringing high school students, college students, and skilled professionals to the attention of civil service opportunities that are already available and bridging the gap between school and the workforce by having professionals teach in schools.
“The future of Fort Huachuca is really in the realm of multi-domain operations,” Ives said, “and what that means is we’re going to operate within the electromagnetic spectrum.” “And when you talk about working inside of that, and then you talk about signals, and you talk about physicists, we’re talking about electrical engineering.”
Colonel Ives explained that conventional military control has expanded beyond air, land, and sea into cyberspace, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum—which requires control of cyberspace and space simultaneously.
Combine that with Fort Huachuca’s land, restricted airspace, and Tombstone military operations airspace — which allows the fort to extend training airspace to the New Mexico border — the military installation becomes the only certified multi-domain training complex. in the United States of America.
Colonel Ives said this would provide a variety of manpower opportunities that the fort was looking to fill.
“We will bring all kinds of capabilities to Fort Huachuca as the future continues to evolve,” Ives said. “It means we’ll have all kinds of jobs from everything from tourism and hospitality – which is what we have in the installation – to physicists who will help design some of these capabilities that we’ll be implementing in this range.”
Both said the partnership is in its early stages, so no formal agreement or funding has been allocated yet. Dr. Clay said she will survey local school district administrators in June to see what they would like to see from the collaboration.
“We’re working on the Supervisors Roundtable, where we’ll look at all the top five educational concerns,” Clay said. “And what we’re going to do is have Colonel Ives talk about what’s going on at Fort Huachuca during this round table.”
Colonel Ives said the roots of the partnership began when looking at the strategic plan for the fort. Note that input from education professionals in the area was missing.
“Especially if you’re going to talk about the things that bring people into society, like hospitals, housing, fun things to do, education,” Ives said. “Those are the big pieces that everybody needs to choose the area they want to live in… How do we expand beyond Sierra Vista and into Douglas and Bisbee and all the other cities that we tend not to focus on because they’re not right outside our gates. So building a community is building a community in Cochise County , and not just in Sierra Vista.”