Business View Civil & Municipal | July 2022

109 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 7 HENDERSON, TEXAS Job Training program, which offers grants for career training in high schools. The state offers $150,000 grants to the region, and the city has been able to take full advantage of that entire amount each year over the past four years. Clary notes, “Then we match it from our Henderson economic development funding. So we’ve infused almost a million dollars into our high school’s career technology training programs over the last four years. We are really pushing up the opportunities for our kids to learn career tech training here in things like culinary and architectural and engineering and robotics and welding and those types of things. We also have an incredible health sciences program in our high school right now. This career program is incredibly important to give students more opportunities, and we are really proud of that.” The city works with nearby Kilgore College for its career tech programs, and they are hoping the college will establish a branch in town eventually. “They are a key player here,” Clary says. “It’s not happening yet, but we’ve had some conversations about that. We work with them as much as we can, and when we have an opportunity, we take advantage of it.” Henderson’s major employers are the city and county governments, as well as the two state prisons that call the city home. Clary acknowledges, “That’s another whole area that we don’t talk a whole lot about, but they employ over 1000 people between the two of them. They contribute so much to the community in a lot of ways. It’s more than just housing prisoners. They help get them back into society and be able to contribute well to society and hopefully not go back to prison ever. They go over the top with that to try to help these people acclimate back into the real world. It’s not just throw them in jail for a few years and send them home. They work really, really hard to help these people out.”