FAIRMONT — Donna Heston received a round of enthusiastic applause from a packed house of students after telling them to do something that normally wouldn’t be allowed during an assembly.
Take out your phones, the Marion County Schools superintendent announced in the auditorium at East Fairmont High School on Wednesday afternoon.
“This is our world,” Heston said with a broad smile.
Make that a broadband smile.
The school hosted a “broadband summit” that afternoon, presented by the West Virginia Public Education Collaborative, for ninth- and 10th-grade students from East, Fairmont Senior and North Marion high schools. Discussions were led by industry leaders building the future of connectivity in West Virginia.
Donna Peduto, the collaborative’s executive director, said the day was a big first step in building a homegrown workforce in the Mountain State.
“We’re excited,” she said. “We’ll talk to 1,400 kids by the time we’re done today. They’re the future of high tech.”
The summit included an interactive exercise on encryption and a panel discussion featuring Bill Walker, executive director of the National Cyber Defense Center in Morgantown and Huntington. He is also a senior adviser for national security and cyberspace programs for the Office of the President at WVU.
Walker, who has a military background, said today’s jobs in his field don’t always involve sleek, techno-thriller-looking war rooms and security clearances to the highest degree.
Good-paying jobs are also to be had for contractors, electricians and the like, he said, since physical structures to house and support such grids also need to be built.
The structure where he was speaking Wednesday – East Fairmont High School – is right off Interstate 79 in the heart of north-central West Virginia’s high-tech corridor.
And a technology park housing a NASA diagnostic agency critical to spaceflight is literally right down the road, he said.
Hands-on tech security people can make up to $200,000 a year, he said, and expansion of broadband connectivity to more and more parts of the nation means people don’t necessarily have to move to find the employment they want.
“You’ll never be without a job,” he said, while faces lit up by smartphones looked on.
