Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is reporting that Waukesha County Technical College's Institute for Graphics and Imaging (IGI) has run into serious problems. Read more.

The IGI was intended to be the home of a unique training partnership between WCTC and the printing industry - a national model in which thousands of printing industry workers were to be trained.

But promise has fallen far short of reality. Bice reports that the IGI has trained just a fraction of the workers anticipated. The Institute, which was supposed to be self-sustaining, has fallen behind on debt payments.  The situation is so dire, in fact, that the Institute may dissolve, forcing WCTC to take over debt payments for the facility.

Unfortunately, this isn't an unfamiliar story. 

The IGI, which opened in 2007, was built under a now-expired state law that allowed technical colleges to avoid going to referendum to build an applied technology center.  It is the same state law used by Gateway Technical College to construct the BioCATT and CATI facilities that later became the target of significant scrutiny.

Based on the experience at Gateway, faculty and support staff at WCTC raised serious concerns prior to the construction of the IGI.

We can only hope that WCTC administrators will work collaboratively with faculty and support staff to determine the best way out of the current mess.