For the Reporter

The U.S. Department of Education recently awarded a five-year grant of nearly $550,000 to the Green River Community College court reporting program, the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA) announced today.

The funding is part of the Training for Realtime Writers grants under the Higher Education Act passed by Congress in 2009.

“The grant provides an exceptional opportunity for Green River’s computer reporting technologies program,” said Sidney Weldele-Wallace, CRI, CPE, project manager and chair of the college’s business division. “(It will) build strategic partnerships both on and off campus to promote training of individuals as Realtime writers through implementation of the Career Pathway to Realtime Writing (Pathway) Project.”

Weldele-Wallace also serves a faculty for the school’s computer reporting technologies program and co-chairs NCRA’s Court Reporting Program Advisory Committee.

The NCRA is a leading organization representing stenographic court reporters, broadcast and CART captioners, and legal videographers.

According to Weldele-Wallace, the funding will support two main goals of the Pathway Project – increasing enrollment numbers and improving student learning.

Under the project, increasing enrollment will be targeted through a nine-month introductory course series taught at a regional center that annually provides career and technical secondary education to more than 700 students from five area school districts.

The center offers cost-effective, quality job training in programs, which are too expensive to offer at every high school. The recent grant funding will support marketing of Realtime careers to high school students seeking career and technical training, equipment purchases for a dedicated classroom to offer beginning theory classes, and on-site instruction.

“Students will earn both college credit and credit toward high school graduation, and upon graduation will continue their training through the program’s regular campus and online course offerings,” Wedele-Wallace said.

Opportunity to gain experience

The Pathway Project also will provide advanced Realtime students with innovative, hands-on experiential learning, multiple applied learning experiences, and the opportunity to work with industry members by partnering with Green River’s Disability Support Services office and with the Washington State Center for Childhood Deafness and Hearing Loss (CDHL).

“These activities will give students a more engaging, fulfilling and career-focused education via contextualized and applied learning experiences, including training in online tools to provide remote, cost-efficient Realtime writing experiences, captioning of instructional videos to comply with ADA requirements, and more,” Wedele-Wallace added.

In 2012, Green River received a Realtime grant, which was primarily used to support need-based scholarships and to implement a cohort model for new students designed to increase retention. Prior to 2012, the school’s court reporting program was awarded two congressionally-directed appropriations grants, U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray.

Founded in 1965, Green River Community College will celebrate its 50th Anniversary next year. The first court reporting classes were offered on campus in January 1973. Now called Computer Reporting Technologies, the program offers Associate of Applied Arts degrees in Court Reporting and Captioning as well as certificates in Text Entry and Scoping. The program draws between 75 to 80 students annually who can participate in both on-campus and online classes.

On-campus students train in state-of-the-art classrooms, while online students receive direct feeds and live broadcasts from the classrooms. The program also operates a dedicated four-station captioning suite for hands-on training for students pursuing broadcast and CART captioning. The college’s Computer Reporting Technologies program also offers two independent retraining workshops for professional reporters.

For more information, visit www.ncra.org.

Career information about the court reporting profession – one of the leading career options that do not require a traditional four-year degree – can be found at crtakenote.com.