The Buffalo News

As Buffalo’s economy reinvents itself, education must keep pace with the change, and starting in the early grades is a key to the advanced careers that beckon

The RiverBend site in South Buffalo is supposed to be bustling in just 18 months with scientists doing research and laborers producing solar panels that will provide energy all over the country.

Around the same time, area classrooms will come alive with students as young as 6 studying the most basic concepts of production and science. They will start with hands-on activities such as fashioning pipe cleaners into replicas of the compounds being worked with at the SolarCity factory. By the time they reach high school, they may study the actual particles while using professional-grade equipment.

As business and political leaders celebrate the nearly 3,000 jobs that will come with the SolarCity project, they and educators across the state also are looking for ways to prepare a cadre of workers. And in some cases that will start in the earliest grades of the public school system.

Buffalo’s economy is reinventing itself, and with it so are programs in area schools as educators look to prepare students for future jobs in growth industries such as manufacturing, health care and hospitality.

In the next decade, the state Labor Department figures that Buffalo-area employers will need to hire 165,000 workers, and demographics suggest that number could be even greater depending on when baby boomers retire.

Jobs at SolarCity, where state leaders broke ground last week, will range from manufacturing positions that pay $45,000 a year to engineers and researchers making upward of $100,000.

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