We had a great rollout of the Tough Tools for Cool Schools campaign with Lowe’s at Lovejoy High School in Hampton, Ga. An obvious highlight was having NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson pull the #48 racecar into the Lovejoy automotive lab. In the words of instructor Price Jacobs who is a 20-year construction trades instructor at Lovejoy: “This is the greatest day of my teaching career.” Lowe’s will be presenting Kobalt tools to 515 SkillsUSA building trades programs nationwide. The estimated value of the tools is $317,000. National officer Cameron Thomas of Texas was a great speaker at the event. He spoke of the value of his teachers, CTE and SkillsUSA. Wendy Venturini, an anchor for the Speed Channel was mistress of ceremonies for the event. The nice part? Wendy is from North Carolina and a former gold medalist in Prepared Speech at SkillsUSA. She told everyone that her career had been directly influenced by her participation in SkillsUSA. Here’s a link to an ESPN video and the Lowe’s event: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY5Q89GObP4. A big thank you to Gayle Silvey, Georgia state association director for all her work in organizing the event at Lovejoy High School and getting the students and teachers prepared for the spotlight.

Tags: NASCAR, Racing, Tough Tools for Cool Schools

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Executive Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.