County Mayor Weston Wamp on Wednesday reiterated his wish to resurrect a downtown vocational school at the Gateway building purchased by the school system last year.
“At the heart of good families is a decent job,” he said.
He called the push of the last 20 years to send all students to college a one-size-fits-all model and a “huge failure.”
“Everybody’s going to go to college. Everybody’s going to get in line,” he said. “No, no, no.”
“I’m particularly worried about boys today,” he said. “I get the sense that a bunch of them are bored.”
County Mayor Wamp cited upticks in local crime and prison entry, and that two-thirds of local college students are women.
“Education is a winding journey for all of us,” he said. He held up four-term county executive Dalton Roberts as an example. Mr. Roberts had attended Kirkman Technical High School downtown, shuttered in the 1990s to make way for the riverfront overhaul, and went on to earn college and graduate degrees.
The county earlier bought the Gateway Building on the side of Cameron Hill from BlueCross for $10 million.