A pipeline has been formed that is designed to make plumbing a more attractive career path for young students.
S&D Plumbing and Coppera Plumbing and Commercial Services reached agreements with the Department of Labor to be able to offer pre-apprenticeships and registered apprenticeships at local high schools. The signing day event was held at Taylor Independent School District Events Center Aug. 11.
The event was hosted by Texas Workforce Solutions Rural Capital Area, a community partnership that provides employment services to businesses and job
seekers.
Soon Craftsman College, a school seeking to redefine the way trades are taught, will launch and expand the apprenticeship agreements that were reached. The school is spearheaded by Sam Dowdy Sr. and Lindsie O’Neill Almquist, a former educator, who will be the college’s president.
Dowdy Sr., owner and operator of S&D Plumbing, said students can walk out of high school with their first plumbing license and be eligible to make $20 to $30 an hour if the program progresses how he would like it to. “This is a solution to a major problem,” Dowdy Sr. said. “We now have a clear pathway to success for the students, for anybody that’s wanting to get into the career.”
Dowdy Sr. is the driving force for the agreements being reached. He was introduced to plumbing when he was in high school, so he has first-hand knowledge of what programs like this can do for a person’s life.
He passed his love of the trade on to his son, Sam Dowdy Jr., who owns and operates Coppera Plumbing and Commercial Services.
“Learn how to do plumbing, and you can change the course of poverty in a family for generations to come,” Dowdy Sr. said. “I am one of those guys. It affected and changed my life.”
Frank Denton, chairman of Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, said the plumbing industry is in desperate need of young plumbers in Texas.
He said there were 12,299 master plumbers in Texas, but the average age for a master plumber is 54 years old.
“What you are doing is critical to our mission,” Denton said during his remarks.
Increasing the number of people in apprenticeships started to become a major priority in 2014 when the public began worrying about who was going to replace the Baby Boomer generation in fields of trade, said Lee Price, the Texas state director for the Department of Labor.
There were only 375,000 apprentices across the country at one point, a number that Price says has doubled in the time since.
“For years and years, back when we had that number, we told everybody they had to go to college,” Price said. “In a lot of cases that’s true, but not all cases.
