Editor’s note: This editorial is the second part of a two-part series. The first part ran Sunday.
Robert Sandel, president of Virginia Western Community College, has a vision for the future of Roanoke. He shares that vision with many others in the realms of business, higher education and government in the Roanoke and New River valleys, but rarely is that vision expressed so succinctly.
He described an “innovation corridor” extending along Jefferson Street Southwest, from Riverside Circle, where the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC reside, north past the Radford University Carilion campus at Jefferson and Elm, past the RAMP Regional Accelerator across from Elmwood Park for incubating technology-based businesses, and into downtown.
“There have been a lot of locations on each side of that street that have been bought out by potential developers waiting for these technology council companies to come in here,” Sandel said.
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Another impending addition to this corridor is a shared life sciences laboratory to which the state will contribute $15.7 million and the Star City will contribute $1.96 million. The plan is to renovate a Carilion-owned building about midway between Riverside Circle and RAMP to create lab space for use by the kinds of startup companies that might be spawned by the sorts of research pursued at the Fralin Institute.
It must be noted that RAMP, opened in 2017 and acknowledged as an important ingredient in shaping this dream (the acronym stands for Regional Accelerator and Mentoring Program), began as a collaboration between Virginia Western, the city of Roanoke and the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council.
The region needed a business incubator where fledgling businesses could grow their wings without taking flight to other states. The city received a state grant for $600,000 to renovate the old Gill Memorial Hospital building.
As Sandel recalled it, in the room full of business leaders where then-Roanoke City Manager Chris Morrill discussed the project, Morrill asked who would be willing to be the operator for the accelerator and thus enable the city to deploy the grant. When Sandel raised his hand, Morrill quipped, “Sold, to Bobby Sandel!”
The college has since stepped back from that role. RAMP is now run by the Blacksburg-based Verge organization. In a sense, Virginia Western incubated the incubator.
Navigating new worlds
The Roanoke Valley is working to change its economic climate, aiming to take maximum advantage of Virginia Tech’s biomedical research to encourage entrepreneurship and work with more startup companies, “trying to get into the new world,” Sandel said. He noted, though, that this can’t be the only focus of economic development for the region. “The new world doesn’t mean that manufacturing is going away. Manufacturing is still the base.”
Before Italian automotive electronics company Eldor Corp. decided in 2016 to build a plant in Botetourt County’s Greenfield industrial park, executives toured Virginia Western’s mechatronics lab, because they wanted to see that potential employees could receive training for the type of high-tech work done at their plants.
After Virginia Western’s new building for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) opened in 2019, Eldor executive Luca Forte took another tour, and expressed admiration both for how the college incorporated Eldor’s suggestions as to what topics and types of machinery to include in the curriculum and how quickly it had done so.
Sandel emphasized that the school’s workforce initiatives collaborate with companies to have students job-ready, whether that job is making sophisticated electronic parts or becoming a radiology technologist or a commercial truck driver.
As has been trumpeted by statewide economic development and education initiatives such as Growth4VA, making access to higher education easy and affordable is just as vital as tailoring education opportunities to match available jobs. “Money should not be an issue for so many of these kids that go to college,” Sandel said.
School and government officials in the Roanoke Valley recognized this, and worked to start the Community College Access Program, the first of its kind in the Virginia Community College System, that makes it possible for high school students in Roanoke, Salem, and Botetourt, Craig, Franklin counties who have the required grade point average to attend Virginia Western with up to three years of tuition covered. CCAP receives public funds from local governments, matched with private funding raised by the WVCC foundation.
Sandel noted with pride that the CCAP program is fully funded, with every student that applied from partner localities receiving a tuition grant this past year.
Making differences
In a 2019 commentary published in these pages, because of RAMP, CCAP, the STEM building and many more reasons, Roanoke business leader and philanthropist Heywood Fralin praised “remarkable” Virginia Western as “one of the most important players in this movement to a knowledge-based economy.”
In an increasingly polarized society, the Roanoke Valley has continued to uphold a tradition of recognizing the common good and working toward it.
“I’ve been involved in the politics of the Roanoke Valley for the last 20 years,” Sandel said. “I think we have politicians that want to do the right thing. They’re trying to help out their constituencies. Most everybody I’ve worked with, Republican or Democratic, has been very supportive of Virginia Western and what we’re about.
“They see that the community college is an economic driver, and they see that we can make a real difference.”
Sandel’s hand at the helm of Virginia Western has made a world of difference, and at the moment he has no plans to retire, so the Roanoke Valley will continue to benefit from his determination and his wisdom.