LAKEWOOD, Wash. - While President Obama was giving high marks to the $826 billion stimulus package on its one-year anniversary, Jim Jones was taking his students through their forklift finals.
"Seatbelt fastened and then you can go ahead and take it off of park," Jones tells one of his students at Lakewood's Clover Park Technical College.
The school is preparing students for what the President calls the jobs of the future: clean energy and technology.
The President says green jobs will keep the United States competitive with the rest of the world which already has a jump on us. He says green technology will ship products instead of jobs overseas.
Students at Clover Park are preparing for a career in cleaning up the messes left by industries and businesses of the past. They call them brownfields - patches of contaminated property all over the state - because they stand in the way of future development and the President wants them cleaned up.
That's why the Environmental Protection Agency is investing a half million dollars in the Clover Park program.
"They go through the program, they will be certified to work in hazardous waste cleanup," said Acting Regional EPA Administrator Michelle Pirzadeh.
The job market has suffered from the economic downturn, but several brownfield projects are currently underway in the state and dozens more are on the way.
Clover Park student Jerremmy Miller said he came to Clover five years ago when he was unemployed and looking for any kind of job. He found out he is very attracted to the hazardous cleanup industry and is now preparing to turn his Associates Degree into a Bachelors Degree. He and the White House are banking on the green job sector taking off by the time he graduates.
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