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Southern W.Va. CTC receives $1.8 million grant to launch AI Readiness & Capacity Initiative
LOGAN, W.Va. — Southern West Virginia Community & Technical College (Southern) is launching a comprehensive AI Readiness & Capacity Initiative, a four-year, institution-wide effort designed to advance the responsible integration of artificial intelligence across academic programs and student services. The initiative is supported by $1.8 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) Grant Program.
“This significant investment allows Southern to intentionally and responsibly leverage artificial intelligence in ways that directly support our students and faculty,” said Dr. Corley Dennison, Interim President of Southern West Virginia Community & Technical College. “As a rural institution serving a high-need region, this initiative ensures our students are not left behind in a rapidly evolving technological landscape, while strengthening our capacity to deliver high-quality instruction and wraparound support services.”
Southern serves a rural, high-need region of Appalachia marked by low household income, limited educational attainment, and persistent barriers to college access and completion. A majority of Southern’s students are first-generation and low-income, many of whom balance coursework with work and family responsibilities. These challenges contribute to ongoing issues related to retention, completion, and access to consistent academic and student support services. The AI Readiness & Capacity Initiative is designed to directly address these challenges by leveraging AI to enhance teaching, learning, and institutional effectiveness.
A central focus of the initiative is improving teaching and learning through the integration of AI tools, AI-supported instructional strategies, and AI-related content in high-impact academic programs, including Nursing, Allied Health, Business, Information Technology, and General Education. Faculty will participate in a structured professional development model that begins with baseline AI literacy workshops and progresses to discipline-specific training. By year three of the initiative, Southern anticipates that at least 75 percent of faculty will be using AI-enabled strategies to deliver more personalized instruction, improve student engagement, and strengthen learning outcomes. In addition, the college will develop new AI-focused academic offerings, such as an AI foundations course or certificate, to prepare students for an evolving, technology-driven workforce.
The initiative also strengthens student support services and operational efficiency through targeted AI-driven innovations. Southern will implement a 24/7 AI-powered student services chatbot to provide real-time assistance, deploy a predictive early-alert analytics system to identify and support at-risk students, and pilot AI-assisted administrative tools to streamline internal processes. Together, these efforts are expected to increase access to timely student support, reduce staff workload, and improve overall responsiveness. As a result, the college projects an increase of at least five percentage points in first-year student retention by the end of the grant period.
To ensure ethical, sustainable, and responsible adoption of artificial intelligence, Southern will establish a college-wide AI task force and develop a comprehensive AI policy framework. AI expectations and training will be embedded into ongoing professional development and new-hire orientation to ensure long-term institutional alignment. Continuous improvement will be guided by a robust evaluation plan that includes baseline data collection, annual assessments, a formal midpoint evaluation in year three, and a summative evaluation in year four. These evaluations will measure faculty AI adoption, student achievement, effectiveness of support services, operational improvements, and overall gains in institutional capacity.
By the conclusion of the AI Readiness & Capacity Initiative, Southern West Virginia Community & Technical College will have established a sustainable AI infrastructure, enhanced instructional quality, expanded student support systems, and developed a replicable model for responsible AI integration at rural community colleges. The initiative positions Southern as a regional leader in AI-driven educational innovation while expanding opportunity and improving outcomes for Appalachian learners and the communities the college serves.
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MECC Foundation to host 50th anniversary John Fox Jr. Literary Festival
BIG STONE GAP, Va. — The MECC Foundation is pleased to announce the 50th anniversary John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival featuring New York Times best-selling authors Silas House and Beth Macy and moderator Amy Clark on Wednesday, March 11 from 10 a.m. to noon. The festival is free and open to the public and school groups are welcome to attend.
In coordination with the festival event, the MECC Foundation will host the 40th annual Lonesome Pine Short Story Contest and the 23rd annual Lonesome Pine Poetry Contest. The deadline for submitting entries is Monday, Feb. 23, at 4:30 p.m. Entry categories include adult, high school (grades 9 through 12), and middle school (grades 6 through 8). Contest rules and information about the festival is available on the MECC Foundation website at https://www.mecc.edu/jffestival/. Winners of the contest will be announced during the Literary Festival Event. All winners will receive a cash prize.
Following the author discussion, the MECC Foundation will feature a special luncheon with House, Macy, and Clark at the John Fox Jr. Home in Big Stone Gap beginning at 12:45 p.m. Tickets for the luncheon are $30 and can be ordered by calling the MECC Foundation office at (276) 523-7466. Tickets are extremely limited, so please reserve early for this event.
Silas House is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the novels Clay’s Quilt, 2001; A Parchment of Leaves, 2003; The Coal Tattoo, 2005; Eli the Good, 2009; Same Sun Here (co-authored with Neela Vaswani) 2012, Southernmost, 2018, and Lark Ascending, 2022, as well as a book of creative nonfiction Something’s Rising, co-authored with Jason Howard, 2009; and four plays. 2025 sees the publication of his first book of poetry, All These Ghosts, and his first murder-mystery (under the pseudonym S.D. House), Dead Man Blues.
Beth Macy is a Virginia-based journalist who writes about outsiders and underdogs. She is the award-winning author of three New York Times-bestselling books examining communities left behind by corporate greed and political indifference. Her first book, Factory Man, explored the aftermath of globalization on rural communities and won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize. Dopesick, her investigation of the opioid crisis, was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, and was described as a “masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by The New York Times. Dopesick was made into a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning Hulu series on which Macy served as an executive producer and cowriter. Her most recent book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, is a combination memoir and reported analysis of the rural-urban divide told through the lenses of backward mobility, political polarization, and the decimation of local news.
Amy Clark is Professor of Rhetoric and Applied Linguistics at UVA’s College at Wise, and Co-Director of the Center for Appalachian Studies. She is co-editor and author of the book Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity, and Community (University Press of Kentucky, 2013.) She is host and producer of the podcast Talking Appalachian (recently featured in The Atlantic,), and her writing about the region and its dialects has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Oxford American, and Harvard University Press blog.
For more information on the MECC Foundation, please visit our website at www.meccfoundation.org.
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