The Career and Technical Line

2011 – present

The corporation's own: The public corporation's career-technical education ran for years in the wings of its high schools. When Clay High School closed in 2024, the corporation gathered its career-technical programs into the Clay building, which reopened that year as the St. Joseph County Career Hub — a closed high school turned to the trades and technical courses, carried in the Clay entry above.

Career Academy — a charter school, not the corporation's: Career Academy South Bend opened in August 2011 at 3801 Nimtz Parkway, in the Blackthorn area at the city's northwest edge, in a converted credit-card statement-processing plant of some 106,000 to 110,000 square feet of industrial space. It was co-founded by Larry Garatoni and Steve Hartz. The city's Redevelopment Commission staff report of 8 September 2011 records the project's shape: $13.9 million to acquire, renovate and equip the building, construction financing from the Garatoni Family Foundation and $3.5 million in private contributions, Garatoni's own million among them; the conversion, by Panzica as design-builder, fitted the first 40,000 square feet in fifteen weeks. The school opened with grades seven through nine, about 125 students to a grade, and added a grade a year to a full seven-through-twelve. Its conversion won an American Society of Interior Designers Illinois Design Excellence Award in 2012. The school has grown into the Career Academy Network of Public Schools, its charters authorized through Trine University's Education One — the network's Success Academy elementary opened under a charter running from 2015, renewed to 2025, and a Success Academy at the Boys & Girls Club was added in 2024; the network's high school enrolled about 416 and its middle school about 402 in 2020–21, by its authorizer's portfolio report. Career Academy's pursuit of the closed Clay building under the state's dollar law is carried in the Clay entry above and, as a dispute, in City Controversies.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend Redevelopment Commission, staff report of 8 September 2011 — the Career Academy project's cost, financing, site and conversion.
2. Education One at Trine University, charter portfolio reports — the network's authorizations and terms, the Success Academy charters of 2015 and the renewal to 2025, and the 2020–21 enrollments.
3. Trine University news, 2024 — the Garatoni gift of $2.5 million naming Ivy Tech's Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Automation in South Bend, of a piece with the same family's Career Academy founding.
4. The corporation's record of the Clay building's reuse — the career-technical programs' move of 2024 and the St. Joseph County Career Hub.