Governor Lee Cuts Ribbon on $4.8 Million TCAT Parsons Expansion

Governor Bill Lee stood alongside TCAT Crump President Stephen Milligan in Parsons Wednesday to officially open a $4.8 million, 11,000-square-foot expansion at the Tennessee College of Applied Technology's Parsons campus, a facility years in the making that will anchor workforce training for Decatur County's next generation of skilled tradespeople.

The addition, funded through the state's $1 billion TCAT Master Plan, which Lee championed as the largest investment in Tennessee's technical colleges in state history, will house the campus's Heavy Equipment Technology program and create room for additional technical programs driven by regional employer needs. Milligan described the project as central to what the Parsons campus was built to do. "This state-of-the-art building will help TCAT Crump's Parsons Campus expand its role as a leading career technical education center for workforce development in our local community," he said.

The expansion lands at a campus already carrying significant enrollment weight. More than 233 Decatur County high school students are currently dual-enrolled at TCAT Parsons, earning technical credentials before they graduate. That figure reflects years of investment by both the state and the Ayers Foundation, which has partnered with TCAT Crump to extend college access and counseling to students in rural Tennessee. The Parsons-based foundation has helped more than 100,000 students since 1999, with 56 percent going on to community colleges or a TCAT campus.

The groundbreaking on the expansion took place in July 2024, with the facility originally targeted for a Spring 2025 student opening. Today's ribbon cutting marks the formal completion of that timeline.

For the Heavy Equipment Technology program specifically, the new space addresses a physical constraint that had limited enrollment capacity. The program runs five trimesters and covers diesel engine mechanics, hydraulics, and electronic diesel engine controls, skills in direct demand across West Tennessee's agriculture and construction sectors.

Lee has made TCAT expansion a recurring priority since 2019, and the Parsons ribbon cutting follows similar ceremonies in Elizabethton, Kingsport, and Morristown. The difference in Parsons is scale relative to community size: in a county of roughly 12,000 residents, placing 233 high schoolers inside a technical college simultaneously represents a structural bet on trades-based economic development that few rural counties in the state have matched at the same rate.