February 18, 2025
Fort Smith seniors find Peak opportunities
Fort Smith seniors find Peak opportunities

A partnership between the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and Fort Smith Public School District educators has helped open the new Peak Innovation Center for health care, first responders, drone pilots and other vocational career opportunities for students.

The Peak Innovation Center opened March 28, UAFS officials announced.

Through the UAFS Western Arkansas Technical Center, students at Peak can complete college courses and earn credentials while still attending high school, many of which flow seamlessly into advanced degrees and job placement.

Students enrolled in automotive technology, computer-aided drafting, and welding will remain at the UAFS campus. The certified nursing assistant and licensed practical nursing programs will finish the spring semester at UAFS campus, but will be offered at Peak this fall.

“It just wasn’t practical to move programs like automotive and welding and computer aided design,” Amanda Seidenzahl, director of WATC said. “Those programs are also very capital intensive, but we already have good facilities on our campus to keep them there. We still have students in those programs. We’re still graduating students in those programs, and they often move into our additional programs that we have available on our campus, so we’re excited about that. This just provides more capacity in general for the Western Arkansas Technical Center.”

On Wednesday, the UAFS Board of Visitors and university administrators visited Peak Innovation for a tour led by Stephanie Freeman, career development facilitator, Amye Drackett, career development facilitator, and Seidenzahl, director of WATC.

Amye Drackett and Stephanie Freeman speak about how FSPS students can take CNA and LPN classes in the Baptist Health and Mercy Health Sciences lab.

The group visited the Baptist and Mercy Health Sciences lab where certified nursing assistants and licensed nurse practitioners can take classes and live tests with mannequins. Students who are interested in becoming emergency responders can practice with a real ambulance onsite at Peak.

The UAFS WATC program serves 21 school districts from Crawford, Franklin, Johnson, Logan, Scott, and Sebastian counties, providing concurrent credit classes at no charge to participating high school students.

Following the tour, Seidenzahl, director of WATC, Dr. Latisha Settlage, dean of the College of Business and Industry at UAFS and Terisa Riley, chancellor at UAFS gave a short panel discussion about all the opportunities FSPS high school juniors and seniors will have at Peak.

Settlage said they are aware of the amount of capacity at Peak and their marketing team is working hard to present the programs to students and parents. Their team also interacts with Fort Smith Public Schools and their manufacturing partners.

“Because they, of course, will consume the product of all the skilled students that come out and are ready to work,” she said. “So we want to obviously market the skills and things the students come out with but we also want to emphasize the state of the art facility. So it’s really exciting.”

Latisha Settlage, dean of the College of Business and Industry talks about new developments at Peak Innovation.

Settlage recalled one potential project in which a Fort Smith manufacturer came to their team at Peak and asked if they could donate materials to have FSPS students machine parts for them. 

“Wow, that’s exciting,” she said. “That is a project that is clearly something that makes those skills front and center for the students that will help us out from a budget perspective, quite honestly. And it also helps them out. So it’s kind of this win-win-win-win-win all over the place for Fort Smith. I think those kinds of things put us on the map, which we’re always interested in.”

https://www.swtimes.com/story/news/2022/04/22/fort-smith-seniors-find-peak-opportunities/7381473001/