Our History

Patrick County Education Foundation is an education-based economic development initiative launched in 2001 to enhance job opportunities and recruit new businesses and industries to the County by raising the education attainment levels of Patrick County citizens.  The need for such an initiative became sharply apparent during the late 1990s as more and more of the businesses and industries that had long provided good jobs and economic stability to our region began to reduce their workforces and shutter their plants. 

Long dependent on the textile, timber and tobacco industries, the people of Patrick County have been hit hard by the rapid decline in those sectors.  In the mid- to late 1990s, we experienced firsthand the impact of the changing economy, from one dependent on physical labor to one driven by knowledge, by information.  People were laid off, shifts cut, and plants closed.  Unemployment became an all-too-familiar condition.  With few local employment opportunities beyond those in the rapidly vanishing old-economy industries, the people of Patrick County were facing an uncertain economic future. 

It was from amid this declining economic landscape that the Patrick County Education Foundation was born.  Its founding impetus rose out of the concerns voiced by community leaders at a late 1990s breakfast hosted just outside of Stuart by Patrick native, the Honorable Gerald L. Baliles, Governor of Virginia from 1986 to 1990.  In that gathering of County business, civic and government leaders, conversation turned to the rising loss of jobs and difficulties in attracting new businesses to the area. 

Baliles…had made economic development one of his top priorities [as governor] and had ample experience recruiting industry to the state.  What he told his guests, he now recalls, probably smacked of gloom and doom.

“I told them things would probably get worse before they got better”—if they ever got better.  As the aging manufacturing plants in the region depreciated, many corporations were not likely to replace them.  Patrick County had one of the lowest educational attainment levels of any Virginia locality; workplace skills were obsolete.  "It wouldn’t be easy," he said, "to get manufacturers to locate there." (Excerpt from James Bacon, “Only One Way Out”, Bacon’s Rebellion, 12/02/2002, www.baconsrebellion.com)

The outdated skills of the old economy, like physical labor, had to be replaced by those valued in the emerging new economy—brainpower, knowledge.  To survive, Patrick County and its people had to confront and address the County’s low education attainment level and do so swiftly. 

From that imperative came the Patrick County Education Foundation—a community-focused economic development initiative launched in 2001 with the bold mission of raising the County’s education attainment level from among the lowest in the Commonwealth to one of the top 5 rural counties by 2011.   Under the leadership of County native, the Honorable Gerald L. Baliles, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization was formed and a Board of Directors was assembled that included key local community, business and government leaders as well as Patrick County natives who had gone on to make their mark outside the County.

Together, they shaped the Foundation’s mission, set its goals and identified key initiatives to:

• Increase the percentage of Patrick County High School graduates who attend college,
• Update and expand the job-skills of the County’s workforce, and
• Increase the number of adults with a high school diploma or higher level of education.

During 2001, the Foundation’s inaugural year, the Board of Directors hired the first staff member, College Access Program Advisor and Foundation Program Director Sandra L. Dales.  In October 2001, the first of the Foundation’s three initiatives, the College Access Program for high school students, began.  In August 2002, the first full-time Executive Director, Gerald L. Hughes, Jr., was hired.  The second initiative, the GED Promotion Project, got underway in spring 2003 and the third, the Workforce Training Program, began in June 2003. 

Since the Foundation’s launch in 2001, much has been accomplished.  Yet, to raise Patrick County’s education attainment levels from near the bottom in Virginia to among the top 5 rural localities by 2011, we have much hard work ahead.    The Foundation’s mission and goals are ambitious, but the payoff for accomplishing them will be a brighter, more secure economic future for the people of Patrick County.