A clearer path to prosperity

Coeur d’Alene’s world-class beauty masks a very ugly truth.

Just beyond all the gorgeous homes, the expensive cars and boats, the fine restaurants and beautiful libraries are poor people. Lots and lots of them.

Our community has a healthy class that’s wealthy, a fairly meager middle class, and a lower economic group that’s frightfully robust. A new United Way study of the Pacific Northwest reflects a startling picture of Coeur d’Alene that most of us can’t see or refuse to acknowledge. In Coeur d’Alene, 43 percent of households subsist just above the poverty level. In the rest of the county, a third of all households have their noses just above poverty’s water line. Who are these people? Why, they’re the working poor.

Unlike many communities, we have some alternatives, some actual solutions, within reach. One of them is North Idaho College.

Now picture this: On one hand we have thousands of adult residents who are barely making enough money to survive. On the other we have a terrific community college struggling with a half-decade trend of declining enrollment. The recessions that send many of us scurrying to unemployment lines actually herald booms in the higher education sector. When people are forced to look for ways to improve themselves, to make themselves more valuable as employees, they go back to school. But when the economy strengthens, as ours has the past five years or so, school and advanced training are out of mind for many. They shouldn’t be.

Two powerful needs, one from a citizenry seeking to make more money and the other from a community college poised to deliver the training that will lead to higher wages, should come together.

Now is as good a time as any. Just ask Rick MacLennan.

He’s the new president of NIC, and you can learn more about him in our Lifestyles section today. MacLennan faces a big challenge with trying to reverse sagging enrollment, but it’s not like he has to fix it by himself. He has a superb team at NIC and, as he notes and we would agree, his predecessor didn’t exactly leave the cupboard bare.

Joe Dunlap put together terrific programs in aerospace and entrepreneurship during his nearly five years on the job. He’s stepping away just as MacLennan and his colleagues step into a brand new career and technical education facility out on the Rathdrum Prairie, where $50,000, $60,000, even $100,000 a year careers are waiting to be made. Dunlap also helped plant seeds that will bear valuable computer training graduates before long.

Resources that have never existed here before are readily accessible now. If you’re part of that struggling 43 percent in Coeur d’Alene or 33 percent in Kootenai County, you owe it to yourself and to your family to see what NIC has to offer you.