 The 2022 annual Southeastern Kentucky Chamber Awards Night is September 27th, for tickets call 606-432-5504. You can also watch live on the free Mountain Top TV app. On Monday, September 19th, Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College celebrated the grand opening for their upgraded nursing department. The upgrade cost nearly $1 million which was awarded by West Virginia Governor Jim Justice. The Mountain Top news spoke with nursing director Sheila Elkins to learn more. I'm thrilled that everybody could come on this beautiful day. It's a wonderful day to Southern. It's a wonderful day for the nursing program. We're very grateful for the grant that was given to us by Governor Justice without it and then this wouldn't have been possible. It was just phenomenal. It was unreal for a little while and then when we started with the ordering process and everything I found out, yes, we definitely spent a million dollars and it was just so exciting to be able to do things that we'd always dreamed of doing financially for small community college. We had no funds to be able to do what we had always dreamed of doing. Elkins and the other leading nursing faculty are more than happy to see the program grow. Their main focus is providing nursing education to those who want to help with the current nursing workforce shortage. We will still have our non-traditional nursing program that will last for semesters and have some regrets and we will start every spring. We will have a non-traditional weekend program that will start every year. It will start every year. So going forward we hope to grow the nursing program even more. There's such a nursing workforce shortage that whatever Southern can do to be able to alleviate this issue, to be able to help more students move on into registered nursing, we will do because that's what Southern does. We work hard for our community. We are great partners with our community and we're very happy to be located here. Reporting from Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Collum.