COLUMBIANA – The Shelby County Board of Education voted to rename the Shelby County College and Career Center at its meeting on Thursday, July 23. According to a press release from the BOE, the school will be called the Career Technical Educational Center, or CTEC for short.

“To create unity within the Shelby County School District, a strategic school name is important,” career technical education supervisor Julie Godfrey said in the press release. “Career Technical Educational Center clarifies the courses designed to prepare students for post-secondary and/or going straight into the workforce that the school offers.”

The press release stated that the BOE made the decision based off the confusion that the current name has caused, mainly because it includes the “college.”

“The front desk currently gets calls every day inquiring about college courses and tuition prices, not knowing that the school is a high school,” Principal Zach McWhorter said in the press release. “Taking the word ‘college’ out of the school name will make it clear this is not a post-secondary institution.”

The press release referred to the new name as “timeless and simplistic and more representative of what is offered at the school.”

The school will receive a newly designated logo, which will feature the school’s abbreviated name and symbols of the different types of careers fields that students are trained for.

“The logo matches the theme of Shelby County Schools as this career technical school is one pathway to prepare students for their journey,” Godfrey said.

Regardless of the school’s name, Godfrey said its purpose is to offer technical courses on a centralized campus to students from all high schools in the Shelby County School system.

This is the second time that the BOE has voted to change the school’s name. Until 2014, the school was referred to as the Shelby County School of Technology. The name was changed to the Shelby County College and Career Center to “emphasize the fact that the school offers multiple pathways to both college and careers.”