Dozens of high school students watched as four-legged drones buzzed past each other like yellow bumblebees in a gym at Kentucky’s Hazard Community and Technical College. More than 70 kids from eight schools had spent hours designing, building, and testing their own remote-controlled quadcopter unmanned aerial devices.

The springtime competition was the culmination of a yearlong high school class in aerospace and aviation organized by the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, a nonprofit that helps 21 school districts in southeastern Kentucky improve their education systems. Now, the cooperative is hoping to take its aerospace program to the next level by building a $25 million drone testing site in Hazard, Kentucky, to help scientists and entrepreneurs hone their drone-related inventions and to prepare students for jobs in the emerging industry.

We want to not only have a site in which drone testing can occur, but we want to develop a workforce so that as the drone industry grows, we will automatically have people that have skills to work in the various areas of drone technology, whether it be drone pilots or technicians or designers or manufacturers,”

said Paul Green, the cooperative’s director of career and technical education and Appalachian technology initiative.

Read the full article by Naomi Nix about drone technology on The 74