By By Uriah Aguon Pacific Daily News
Copyright guampdn
Mount Carmel Academy Charter School on Thursday announced initiating a program that would help meet the demand for skilled workers on Guam, targeting the island’s youth, by teaching skills and trades such as welding, programming, and manufacturing.
The program is in collaboration with the Department of War’s Industrial Base and Sustainment Program, with support from the Indo-Pacific Command.
Benjamin Worrell, senior advisor to the Office of the Secretary of War’s industrial base and sustainment, said the program will focus on grades 3rd to 8th, and is awaiting for Congress to approve its operating budget for fiscal year 2026 before moving forward.
The initial cost for the program, per classroom, “just to buy the equipment,” is $125,000, and then the cost each year to sustain the equipment is $12,500, Worrell said.
The cost to train the teachers is another $10,000 to $15,000.
“It’s going to happen as fast as we can make it,” Worrell said. “100% of the money to start the program is paid for by the Department of Defense, so no money is coming out of the pockets of the schools. It’ll probably be three months after [approval], because we have to get the equipment ordered, have a team come out here and assess the school.”
Worrell said he pitched the program to Mount Carmel in 2024. He piloted it in Hawaii, where success generated $50 million for the local education system after one year of operation.
Worrell, Mount Carmel principal Michael Phillips and school board member Joseph Cruz are confident they “will make this pilot project successful, and that will lead to more programs and more projects coming in,” and eventually expand the program to as many as six schools across Guam.
The idea is to provide youths with an advantage to enter, learn, train, and grow in the skill trades.
Children participating in this program will have experience and a foundation to take with them into high school apprenticeships, college internships, and then the workforce.
“I’m hoping to do two in each program the first year,” Worrell said. “If we can do six, then we’ll roll out to six, but you can only absorb so much in a community, and not all schools are as easy to work with. We leave it up to the school to determine what the capacity is, where their semester program ends.”
Unlocking potentials
Project Manufacturing and Engineering Education Reimagined for All, or Project MFG, aims to create the future workplace, expand and energize educational pipelines, improve baseline skills, and build interest in manufacturing opportunities.
“MEERA focuses on robotics, programming robotic arms, CNC programming, welding, and additive manufacturing,” Worrell said. “It teaches you how to use them all, how to run them, how to program them, and it really unlocks the minds of the children. Surprisingly enough, the teachers that we sent [to learn], who had the willingness to learn and who had the passion, were so inspiring because they were just blown away. They were in love with it.”
Project MFG is a program that focuses on the junior and senior years of high school, offering advanced welding, including building competitions.
This is a program that saw incredible demand in Hawaii and “exceeded our capacity to train instructors,” he said.
Worrell added that the MEERA program has been shown to improve test scores for female students by a range of 30% to 50% across all subjects.
“They don’t have to go into trades or engineering, [but] they’re now better students, better equipped for this world, and there are other jobs they can go into,” Worrell said. “It is more important because we’re giving something back to the kids and opening up their minds. It’s pretty much cutting-edge technology. They will get a robot arm and teach it and program it to do a task, [and] they will design stuff through CNC, [and] they will have to do basic coding. They will have to use advanced additive manufacturing to make a part.”
The demand for female instructors has especially risen in recent years, pulling from students who “watched their dad or uncle weld, and didn’t have an outlet for it, [so] it’s amazing when you give opportunities to adults who didn’t know they had a passion for it.”
Cruz, an industry professional and retired Cabras Marine after 30 years, said this program differs from Guam’s currently active STEM programs by application and nature.
He and Worrell said the program is “all-encompassing,” where students can learn “different types and how they come together,” as opposed to STEM, which is often “introductory and [less] hands-on.”
“STEM is theory, and this is more execution,” Cruz said.
He added how the program ensures Guam’s sustainability in its remote status, so “if an event occur where we cannot import parts, we got to make it here.”
The manufacturing covers everything from homes to ships, planes, submarines, and electrical grids.
“We provide the foundation for 3rd to 6th graders to [help] produce a workforce sooner rather than later,” Cruz said. “What we’ve lacked in developing the workforce is scale. The need to combine DoD with other commercial requirements helps build the scale so that it is sustainable. You have to have activity to produce the workforce, to provide the parts, [to] have a certain amount of workforce to spread out throughout the various islands.”
High demand
Another benefit to the program down the road is the considerable income its workers receive. The salary is $31,464, ranging from $24,000 and $39,000 yearly, according to salary.com, and “there is no disparity” between Guam workers and mainland workers.
Because Guam’s port is the “second busiest port” in the United States, “the lack of skilled workers drives the pay up to keep the workers here.”
“In the past, Guam didn’t have a high demand, but in today’s activity, we have a high demand for industrial support, and we cannot support it with our local workforce,” Cruz said. “It’s only going to grow. They need people to maintain the ships. What we’re trying to encourage is more domestic manufacturing. If you can’t ship stuff in, you got to make it here.”
Additionally, Worrell and Cruz are working to include a certification program for participating teenagers, making them automatically employable once they graduate or complete the program.
“Currently, we are working to build a certification program, because in the mainland, there is instantaneous certification,” Worrell said. “In Hawaii, you’d have to join a union, which is impractical for high school students, and I imagine we’ll find the same thing in Guam.”
There is a challenge to uplifting this industry on Guam.
“We have to go into the industry and assess it,” Worrell said. “What we’re going to find is the same thing in Hawaii: we don’t have a manufacturing industry here. We have to develop the pathways to create it and the educational force to train and inspire them. This is why the National Guard becomes really important.”
As part of their partnership through the program, select members of the Guam National Guard will be sent to Hawaii for 90 days of back-to-back courses, undertaking classes in the relevant skills and trades.
This effort is under the same effort to build the industry on Guam, but it is not directly the same as the program at Mount Carmel.
“We’re going to take inactive members of the National Guard to go back to Honolulu Community College, to the Advanced Manufacturing Inside-Outside Program there, to learn how to do that,” Worrell said. “When they’re not in those courses, they will be interning at The Forge, which is the first of its kind in the world [with] state-of-the-art prototyping, innovation, and advanced manufacturing capability.”
Because of the military buildup and expansion of the defense industry on Guam, Worrell cautions that if “we don’t build the workforce that’s required, we’re just going to continually bring in H2 visas and people from the mainland.”
“You have to give the opportunities for the kids to come back,” he said. “If the kids have high-paying jobs here, then they will come home, because they all want to come home, and that’s what these programs are about.”
The program “fulfills a crucial need” and shows the benefit to the community and “how it is going to make their lives better.” He aims to create an industry in Guam that can cater to surrounding island communities.
“What we’re trying to do is build an ecosystem that drives an economy, but to do that, you have to start on the educational function,” Worrell said. “You have to start in the middle schools, then go to the high schools, and then go to the community college, because we need every facet of it now.”
Moving forward
Worrell has “no doubt” the program will lift off once it starts, because students will “take it home to their parents, so it’s not only educating the students, [but also] their peers.”
“Kids are going to talk when they go into the community,” he said. “They are the best ambassadors for the program.”
Phillips, Worrell, and Cruz are optimistic about starting the next steps in January 2026 and expect the program to start as soon as the following summer or fall.
“Our school is project-based, and we’re never where we should be,” Phillips said. “Joe, for many years, has worked with us to get our 6th to 8th graders started in industrial arts. It’s the perfect home for this. Something like this [will] eventually be a principal base for the economy. If we fill all these positions, more companies will come.”