Students in Lasalle get to see what it’s like to be an electrician. The Windsor Electrical Contractors Association (WECA) donated a $5,000 board to Villanova High School. “Back 40 years ago when I went through the trade, we did everything with little banana clips and plugged in yellow to yellow, red to red,” explains WECA President Mike Hope. The Electrical Training Device changes all of that, Hope says. “Now, they’re actually going to see what goes on in the industry. So, any job site that we have currently going on, you would see the same thing running conduit, putting connectors in mounting boxes. They would get all that experience.” The hope, Hope says, is the students will consider becoming an electrician when they graduate from high school. There’s no shortage of work, he says. “In the last four years with the NextStar (battery) plant coming in, there was over 1,000 electricians working here in Windsor,” Hope says, adding the WECA Electrical Apprenticeship Council has brought in 40 apprentices per year just to get trained. “And now we have the hospital starting up. So those workers we’re now just migrating over to the hospital. So it’s important to keep the workforce high right now.”
